A Year at River Mountain Read online

  This morning I couldn’t find my broom. The broom was not in its place. Hard to credit the size of emotion this loss engendered. I felt such pity for the broom, which I remembered as a new thing with fresh stalks of young bamboo, green and flexible, tied with red twine to a straight smooth yellow wood handle. I was given it shortly after my arrival, and we have been together these long years and cleared the paths season after season and have grown old together. My fingers oiled the shaft each fall. The bristles were thinning, but still.

  I have searched the forest and the ground beneath each tree. Someone has taken the broom while I was away. Zhou Yiyuan has returned already and taken it, perhaps, because it is mine. Now I’m afraid of losing everything, as he said I would.

  All I’ve collected since the foundation of the world. Things I hid since God was a boy. Things I’ve forgotten. All reformations.

  Brooms, of course. House brooms, outside brooms.

  ABUNDANT BULGE

  Two gunshots from the forest to the west. These, together with bits of news filtering in from the outside world, make Zhou Yiyuan’s prophecy believable. Sunshine on wet unmown field grass, webs woven by night heavy with dew — all fragile, on their way out. The dew almost frost.

  Chosn detonated an atomic bomb in a cave. The princely stag that passed me going west an hour ago may be already dead. The repair crew seems agitated as Zhou Yiyuan strides from the frantic encampment to the bridge and back. He’s preparing his people to move on, to finish or give up on the bridge. We hear they are under threat from another tribe.

  To the southwest a dog has been barking since I began writing ten minutes ago. The gunshots and the dog are probably related. Sunlight fixes the great chestnut to its massive crown of exposed roots. The trunk towers over the roof of the shrine and the ground is littered with shiny nuts and split green casings. I hear steps in the leaves.

  STREAM DIVIDE

  Yesterday Zhou Yiyuan brought a sealed message from his sister, placed it on the ground, bowed, then stepped from the shrine back into the shadow of the tree.

  Will you claim the child?

  A channel opens between their village and the monastery, actions from my past waiting to erupt, but to what purpose? What chance would my old sperm have against that of the rampaging boys and men?

  This morning there was a small earthquake. Then I found my broom on the ground: I had left it in a tree, between two sets of forked branches.

  RUSHING YANG

  The master summoned me to his hut near the wishing tree. He was sitting in the courtyard on a red carpet amid fallen leaves and held the black box. We gazed at each other and listened to the birds.

  “An earthquake shook the temple,” he said. “Was that you?”

  “No, Master.”

  “I am not that for you.”

  “I would like to stay here,” I said.

  He cocked his head to one side. “Before going to the cities, I want the three of you to carry an offering over the mountain. Fill your bags with the best fruit and grains and the finest honey and take them to North Valley.”

  We left at midnight and travelled by half-moon along the dry path where our sweat froze along Du Mai and our arms ached.

  At dawn we stopped to eat some of the fruit, my idea, and then continued our climb. Bamboo gave way to pines, dark and velvet, night flickering beneath their branches even at midday.

  My two companions slept in a circle of massive rocks. I was too cold and tired to understand the meaning of this task or of any dreams or thoughts or words, but I still unfolded the little desk. My child is in the past not the future. I can’t think what I’m supposed to learn from Zhou Yiyuan, nor from the master who keeps sending me away. My limbs ache and my sinuses are clogged. I’m colder than I’ve ever been. This place is lost in white fog, the setting sun a great yellow primitive eye.

  Was the central pavilion of my life a theatre, a shrine, or a forest hut? I remember the night my wife gave birth to our child. Such an entanglement of love and worry and release. Her face against the pillow and his arrival.

  We made fire and warmed our hands, breathing clouds of mist, listening to near-human cries: out of the milk-white sea came a small herd of cattle.

  I loved the unnamed world. I emptied hope of its contents and still it haunts its old environs, slack as a spent purse, looking for some grains of dust and a couple of thin seeds. I have in my pocket a letter to give to the abbot at North Valley Monastery and have promised to bring back a reply.

  SUNKEN VALLEY

  A grey dog joined our party and led us west. My brother monks have travelled this way before, so their judgement was quick when the path forked; they agreed with the dog. The dog, they said, must be a North Valley dog, from one of the villages, and would lead us to the nearest pass. But the dog, though happy to be with us, did not seem trustworthy to me.

  On Snow Pass the wind was blowing. The others practised English with me as we walked. I thought we were lost, but one said if we descended more or less north then we would reach a road and soon one of the villages. The other said we should be farther east and might — it was possible — miss the villages if we turned north, but if we went east would no doubt come to a marker or shrine. “The dog is a very good sign,” he said. “Certainly a sign from which to take our direction.”

  INNER COURTYARD

  Rain. At first rain was in the air but not falling. Then it began. We were still wandering the narrow defile at the summit and had found no marker. And then the dog ran off among the rocks. The rain fell hard and soon turned to sleet. Our journey was in ribbons. Top Pass was hidden. The only thing we agreed on was that whatever pass we eventually did find would not be the traditional one between the two valleys. The dog was gone.

  A slash of sleet. What it chose to fall on. Where it struck skin, earth. Blame was everywhere. I couldn’t distinguish cause from blame.

  We blundered steadily on all day and then found shelter beneath an overhanging rock, and slept in the fading afternoon light, trusting snow wouldn’t bury us.

  HARSH MOUTH

  Lost. We heard barking again; in the pitch-black distance it was a welcome sound. We peered out at the feeble light. We were soaked and freezing in the cave and we huddled together under the dripping roof and dozed, flakes dancing outside.

  A leopard crossed in front of our eyes, its tracks filling instantly with snow. The cat stopped, sniffed the air, stared across the path at us, crouched in our shallow cave. Blood warmer. Such desolation between us, then static, qi fizzing, all our hackles reared.

  Yin Earth

  Hidden White

  ALL NIGHT PRAYERS. AN ANIMAL SCREAMING. SMALL FIRE from the last of our stash of wood. Small intestine. Then stars.

  We left rice and fruit for the leopard. Smoke rose to our right as we turned north and began to descend a clear path. The leopard had not eaten us. We trudged down through the snow. Opened the outer frontier gate. Waiguan. Triple Warmer luo.

  GREAT METROPOLIS

  We laboured along the path from Leopard Pass for half a day before we came to this forest clearing, where the buildings and the birds seemed familiar, though the people spoke in a strange dialect. Many of them were sick. There had been waves of illness during the past year. Nothing was certain, they said. Routine was washed away.

  “Our seasons are disordered!”

  “Old streams have run dry!”

  “Our best well has failed completely!”

  “Is your winter coming too soon as well?”

  We exchanged news with the elders and the others went to sleep while I waited in a cold outbuilding for the abbot to send for me. It took an hour to dry my paper in front of the tiny fire.

  I want to go home to River Mountain as soon as possible — tomorrow if the weather is fine. Fear has tightened the faces of these people. Snow clouds are rolling in, and wind gusts on the high slopes. It’s early for such cold, and if we stay longer the mountain may become too difficult to cross.

  SU
PREME WHITE

  “Are you out of the fray or part of the fray?”

  GRANDFATHER GRANDSON (YELLOW EMPEROR)

  I could not answer the North Valley abbot. He had kept us waiting two days, then sent word late last night. I gave him the letter and the fruit and honey and we sat together in the light from an oil lamp while an owl hooted every half-minute as he wrote. He sealed his letter and gave it to me. He said he would visit River Mountain next summer — the world would be changed by then. Then he asked his question. It was freezing in his room and my teeth were chattering.

  Later I thought of what to say, when we’d climbed through the pass again and were on our way down toward the river, which we saw through holes in the clouds.

  I was squatting behind a large double-trunked maple and an owl as calm as Buddha was blinking at me from a branch. “The fray is ahead. The fray is behind. I’m not part of the fray.” I retied my clothes and returned to my companions and told them. They smiled and nodded.

  Once out of the snow we made camp. We ate and prayed. We discussed the dog and the leopard and what else winter might bring. Clouds rolled through the forest and the sun came out. We felt warm in the arid spicy smell of crumbling yellow leaves.

  SHANG HILL

  We chased, leaping, toward home. We saw the temple roof at first light. Opened the gate quietly. Not ghosts returned to haunt, but adventurers with stories. Prodigals practiced at the leopard’s prowl and the owl’s smooth turn.

  THREE YIN CROSSING

  Before the story is made up it’s perfect. Each telling spoils it. Now we must take down the cave shrine. The master himself came to watch. He stood head bowed, each hand warming itself in the opposite sleeve, very still, while the sun shone on the massive green timbers. The shrine in the cave looked impossible from every perspective. Impossible to build, impossible to dismantle. Too ancient, too holy. And yet when we pulled gently at the wood, fitting our fingers into the chinks between the rock face and the structure, it fell into pieces at our feet. Nothing has been keeping it together, though monks have bought their dead masters to this shrine for hundreds of years. The cave looked meek and toothless now, the ground in front worn smooth, the sun shining on a raised ridge of bird shit beneath where the roof-edge had been. The master turned away.

  DRIPPING VALLEY

  I used to drink coffee, which fed a deep sense of anticipation, heart fire. These days are like that, full of expectation, Indian summer boosting the nerves and sunshine in the valley every day. The villagers’ voices grow louder, though they seem less agitated. The bridgework is progressing after all.

  Mornings are thick with fog that soon burns off, trees dripping dew onto yellow and red leaves. Sadness, though, accompanies earth. It will soon be the season of metal, grandfather of wood and spring, time to release grief. Then winter, fire’s grandmother: the Great. Here, unlike North Valley, the seasons are still ordered.

  Every night I dream of cities. I’ve already been displaced twice this month. I still do not want the responsibility of transmitting or translating our knowledge.

  “I don’t want another journey,” I said to the master.

  “And yet you will go and meet these physicians and masters. You will see the prophet.”

  “I don’t want to leave the valley.”

  “It’s only an aspect of yourself leaving.”

  EARTH’S CRUX

  I have the intimation of something, yet it feels like memory: a specific memory, something that happened to me, a happy thing; the light in my wife’s eyes when we were very close, before it all fell apart and I left and she got sick.

  Once we were in the woods, I remember. We’d walked a short distance from the country road into the ferns and firs of a sunny hillside. We were on the soft ground and I was on top of her. We were unexplored then, and the light in her eyes was a new reflection of blue sky, her eyes themselves the colour of earth. So this intimation has to do with that moment.

  Last night the master raised his head and let me see his face. We had finished our sessions for the day. I’d felt his presence as I worked — gall bladder, following metal and water along the great central channel, my partner’s body releasing in a series of muscle spasms — and after bowing at the session’s end, I turned. The master let his hood fall back and his face was open in the dim light, eyes full of tears.

  I can’t believe this world has other countries, lovers, other shocks and deaths and thoughtless blunders. At prayer, just now, my knees were screaming with pain and the small of my back ached, so that I could concentrate on nothing else, and time slowed until all meaning, all responsibility fled my consciousness. The other voices went on, but I heard mine skip syllables and stop.

  Something is coming out of the future and all I can imagine belongs to the past. The master’s tears. The ridge of bird shit. The fist of rice on the snow.

  The last time I saw my wife was in the hospital. No, not that moment. Later, on the city bus, going home after she’d died. Hollowed out. Some words spoken behind my back: “He would like to canoe down the Mississippi.” An old woman across the aisle eating a tomato in a fastidious, slightly ashamed way, eating it like an apple, her head nodding, a book half-closed in her free hand.

  Why have I kept such a thing all this time? And the seals in Active Pass. And we even had a child, a boy, and mine and loved by me. And you who read this. Who are you anyway? How and why did you happen?

  YIN MOUND SPRING

  The temple, the cave, East Shrine and West Shrine, South River Shrine, the lesser shrines, all the paths between. I am in dread of the bridge because I will cross it soon and fly away and perhaps never return.

  Heavy frost this morning. The temperature is falling every day. The village is diminishing, its inhabitants going off, one by one or in small groups. Their enemy invisible, if one even exists. Now the bridgework is almost finished only a few families remain.

  All the day’s light is focussed on the tops of trees, birds singing last songs. A couple of frogs spoke a moment ago. I heard this afternoon a whisper in my partner’s lung — we both heard it as we released his large intestine channel. We both knew it was the whisper of a shadow.

  I’ve taken to reading by the well afternoons when the weather is clear, on the small seat there, reading from old texts. From there I can see through the two gates to the warrior tree, which has lost nearly all its leaves.

  SEA OF BLOOD

  Lonely, today. I have not seen Song Wei since returning from North Valley. A day of rain and at every prayer and chant I fall asleep. Meditation is sleep. The bell is sleep. I hold onto nothing else. The forest teems with yearnings for hibernation. Let the snows fall. The cave is empty, its last miner dust, its last master crumbled. Let me take their place and sleep all winter.

  DUSTPAN GATE

  Each season is an enclosure, each month, each day and each moment separate. I hated leaving the valley, yet I loved being on the mountain. I always hated performance, yet loved rehearsal. I bought my lucky leather jacket in London. It was thin and beautiful, scarred and lined with scruffy wool and I kept it on a hook beside the doctors’ photograph. The people over the pass, pale and disturbed by illness, were envious of us. The abbot, who will visit us next summer when the world is different, may steal something. What has he told the master?

  The turning of a page. That sound. The page turning, the whisper of millennia this side of history. Pages turning and the hiss of brush or scratch of pen or quill, ownership and mystery on speaking terms. Monks have always sat hunched and shivering with cold while they copied the contents of some vision, startled by a door crashing, invaders on horseback, but so embarked and hungry that even as boots echo in the halls, they hold to their squinty path between laziness and passion.

  It would take only a single well-armed man to hold Leopard Pass. This thought arises because I’m afraid of losing what might already be lost.

  What value have I for the world? Today I practiced in the forest, alone except for the win
d and twirling leaves and didn’t want the day to gather darkness, but it did.

  RUSHING GATE

  It sounds dry, the page turning in a room, thumb and forefinger of the left hand rubbing the page to make certain of a single leaf. When the thumb pulls up two or more pages the sound is large and chaos threatens. The creak and kink of the page, so pleased to be turned, separates two faces that have been nose to nose in obscurity for years, even centuries. Perhaps it’s the first time they have been apart or the last time they will be separated. They lie flat, gazing at the ceiling, stunned by light and solitude, and as suddenly as life began it is over and they’re plunged into darkness, dark word to dark word, every page trapped, the boards shut, one book in a shelf of books.

  Do I miss you? Yes I do. Turn the page. Do I miss you? Still yes. Turn a new leaf. Let’s see what I can imagine.

  Turning seventy. Going away. Unseen.

  ABODE OF THE FU

  Out with the tribe, I would have said, talked about this and that over croissants and espresso. About theatre and ambition, what we have and haven’t done, how to advertise ourselves so we may survive a little way into the future. No.

  I wanted to see Song Wei — afraid she might have been cast out — so left my digging in the field to go down to the river.

  She sat on a rock, legs wide, pots in a circle on the gravel around her, her sleeves pinned back. The river noise masked my approach and she jumped when I called out. She was washing pots, her hair loose to her waist, a black curtain against the yellow robe, wet at the tips. Almost immediately her brother came over and crouched at her side and looked up at me. Sly gargoyle blink and grin.

  ABDOMEN KNOT

  “No names,” said the master. “No names for the channels or the points.” He studied the edge of his robe. Dust furred the folds. He turned to me. “That woman will show you a change of course. A new direction.” He shook his head. Thin wisps of hair moved in the icy breeze. “Ah, it’s cold today,” he said. “It was warm yesterday.”