A Year at River Mountain Read online

  “I do not wish to go on a journey.”

  The two other monks, my brother travellers, were still, their heads bowed. Even with three braziers burning in front of the statue, the wind penetrated. The master’s face was half in shadow, the lit part serene, the dark part anxious. This would be our last meeting before we left.

  When he cleared his throat we looked up. “Go to the river,” he said. “Consult the River Map.”

  I lay on a mat. My partner chased qi along the tributaries of my body. Fire, earth, water — his fingers guiding me down. The smell of apples cooking, apples and rice. When I woke (it is always like waking, getting up from the mat) it was already dark, the path to my cold hut marked by a deep drift of yellow leaves.

  GREAT HORIZONTAL

  When we read the river map yesterday, Song Wei was performing a ritual on the bank. I paid more attention to her arms rising and falling than to the dripping knots. Then half a moon last night and a storm, so many swooping leaves that sunrise vanished in gold fractions, no sooner swept into piles than lifted in whirlwinds. One spun across the bridge toward the far shore, another twirled in the storehouse courtyard.

  A child shouted, “Uh! Uh!” every time a family staggered over the bridge into the monastery grounds. The families that left have been returning all day. Has Song Wei made it possible for them to come back? Did they run into trouble?

  Each day we see farther into the death cave now the sun is low and the shrine has been taken down, each day farther, as far as light will penetrate. And since the entrance faces southwest, evening gives us particles of light dancing where shadow begins — and beyond that?

  ABDOMEN SORROW

  Words are names or parts of a name, and because we cannot name, I sit with my folding desk by the shore of this pond and name.

  Once part of the river and since split off, this pond is the temenos of the heron now, and heron stands in a reed-room, neck parallel with the water’s surface. He is blue-grey and leaning toward fish in a sway begun centuries ago. When he is roused by the bell from his hunting to this page, I myself am abruptly split off from the putter of ducks in the pond into a dream so large its edges overlap with sky as I furnish the dream with labels.

  I remember Imogen walking slowly around this pond, the reeds light yellow, olive green, dying; new shoots waiting in the bank, in the silt of the soft bank.

  The low west sun warms my right cheek though all else is freezing. What’s next? Building a stone tower and living inside its walls, finding a friend, cutting down a forest, renovating a cave, eating all the honey, revisiting my birthplace, listening to children?

  Mountain is cut close to the blue sky. A warrior lights briefly on the bridge and his armour clangs like a bell.

  Then Zhou Yiyuan is crouched beside me. He reaches into his robe and pulls out something wrapped in cloth. His breath smells of metal. He places on the ground a small wood carving. I am still writing, only vaguely aware of the heron walking on water, making an exit across the mud shallows, a writhing glossy snake in his beak. The ducks applauding.

  NOVEMBER

  FOOD CAVITY

  TODAY WAS SPENT CUTTING DOWN TREES with a howling chainsaw in a blue-grey fog, chips flying, then loading wood, three of us, into the truck bed, rear wheels axle-deep in mud, air stinking of gasoline and shattered branches.

  Fell asleep at meditation.

  The master has been low these past few weeks. We travelling monks are still parsing the knotted strings pulled from the river.

  SKY RAVINE

  The appearance of a wisp of smoke sent me into the rain and uphill to the walled garden. Just north, near an old mineshaft, I disturbed Zhou Yiyuan. He trundled into the rocky woods, furious, his figure crashing into a tree, and quail flew up from the tangled grass. The remains of a corner-field ritual hissed at the northeast angle of the high wall. I ran to him and he caught my arm, pulled me to the ground and held me, his chest against mine.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  We rolled in the grass. “Your child,” he hissed, his lips close to my ear. Then he was up and away.

  I walked back to the charred effects wet with rain still smouldering on a flat rock. Just burnt wood. Nothing human.

  CHEST VILLAGE

  So much rain in the past few days that a whole section of hillside collapsed when a small number of us were at East Shrine, soil and sand slipping around us, a horrible noise of splintering timbers. I died in the slide and haunted the village by the river.

  ENCIRCLING GLORY

  Wind and rain have invaded the valley. All the paths are mud and all the shrines dark and dripping. Smoke drifts above the river from the tents and shelters, and from our own numerous fires. We have turned on the electric lights. The master slipped and fell. He cracked his head on the frame of the storehouse door and is now lying in his room, flat on his back with his eyes open. Death seems close, if not his then someone’s. The death of something. The village, the monastery, you. I’m counting again.

  GREAT WRAPPING

  Perhaps the world is dying. Until dawn we prayed in the northeast corners of each field and then the master appeared for the Dragon Festival, though he could not turn his head and seemed more than usually distracted and forgetful. The dragon set sail on the river but got so wet and heavy that her wing caught in a bare willow and she was dragged into the fast current. Several villagers waded in to rescue her and were carried downstream and had in turn to be rescued with bamboo poles. She was last seen flailing in rapids, approaching the gorge. The bits and pieces torn from her before she vanished have yet to be divined. We stood along the bank in our ceremonial robes. One sign was water-supporting-fire — the dragon’s kidney — for me, I suppose, since I dredged it from the brown cataract.

  The master’s voice cracked like a whip. “Can anyone read this?” Then he fell again, unconscious, his robes flapping in the mud. The morning’s blue sky gone in angry cloud; then rain, torrents, a dark deluge.

  We stood by the master’s bed. Winds slashed at the roof. The dragon was in the room with us, torn and deflated. This life makes us lonely, not storms. The air smelled of mould and sweat and wet cloth. It was impossible to keep him dry. We stood in a circle, shoulder to shoulder. The corner of a shoulder is a metal perch. Jian Yu. Shoulder bone. The knotted branch of a tree. Now we’re lost who will lead us? We’ll need a boat, an ark, for when our feet no longer touch the ground.

  The master cleared his throat and nodded. He reached one arm in the air. “I know this place, yet it’s different. Only a bend in the path where I hurt myself. I wonder what comes next?”

  Yin Fire

  Summit Spring

  Like the weather with its successions of storms, each ripping then drenching the forest, stirring the river into a brown hissing snake wider every day, I am unsettled. I have always been change-resistant.

  A day of rain and sutras and I’m a spineless grub waiting in its hole gazing fearfully up at the dirty sky, letting storms, winds, even a breeze, determine my course and saying that it was my talent, my gift, while in fact all has erupted willy-nilly, helter-skelter. Rain beats on the shrine roof. Thoughts crawl around with effortless patience and many reversals and repetitions, and only a connoisseur or a mother could appreciate their ugly little faces as they slither over the rough rich humus of a springtime garden, this very one in my head, nibbling a button here, a thread there, the sun a dimple, flowers smiles, toward some unthinkable end, meanwhile basking, each squirm exquisite, on a knee, a cheek.

  Something you would appreciate, maybe: the way, between bouts of storm, thin foggy veils of cloud chase through the stands of bamboo. I watched clouds cross the river this morning, then walked to the bridge during a gap in the rain — everything shining, grey and silver — and looked back at the mountain, the top quarter lost in white, tendrils and fringes of cloud like the ghosts of fleeing children.

  And while looking at the sky a thing occurred to me and I scurried back to the practice hall and
worked in a dream as the thing expanded and developed its little politic. I had no course to abandon, no innocence to spoil. Imogen had managed to carry her innocence into adulthood and wore it now as a kind of thinness. Song Wei was a slender woman, pure and direct, her slight body powerfully grounded in this soil. My thinness was threshed wheat, done and dusty. I guess I have always gauged women according to an ancient hidden scale, and found them superior to me. Ah God, not my mother, please.

  Men ± what? = women.

  The answer will pierce my heart or pierce my kidneys. The final equation will decide the fate of the world. Calm, calm.

  A stinging sleet fell on me as I walked deliberately from the storehouse to the temple.

  CYAN SPIRIT

  After the rain everything is simpler. The river has overflowed its banks and become a long wide lake on which ducks are already fishing. Winter is official. Many villagers have moved in with us since their dwellings are threatened. Children are everywhere; there must be dozens of them. Women turn up in surprising places, nearly always in an attitude of prayer. The men are surly and keep to themselves, in small groups, their black eyes scanning the monastery land.

  This afternoon I served Zhou Yiyuan and the master tea in the master’s hut. A small smoke-blackened wooden figure sat on the low lacquered table. Homunculus? Good grief, Song Wei’s rape has married our two communities.

  So, a lake. Abandoned shacks. With the long grass beaten down the earth seems small and shabby. All the nests I made have gone or have been squashed into absurd shapes, the way all human products fail when our pride meets the elements. So, simpler.

  LESSER SEA

  I heated water, prepared the tea, set bowls of rice on the little table between the men. Each head bowed a fraction. Wet leaves smouldering outside. Smell of burning pine needles, sweet, wafting from the fire.

  Didn’t we love pubs on winter afternoons, to go from the living day to the gloom and beery fug of a barroom? We were innocent then; we were boys and girls, and not even students, though students would join us, called like we were by something helpless, something that had sent up a flare, a distress call. We were free and needed a mission and a damp place to work things out, but could we ever sabotage our parents’ dumb processes? Could we change the world? Could we scam money from the government? We always left drunk and beatific. You with me? Here we go on one of our travels, facing the wonky pub at the end of the small square, all black tarmac and closed shops, rain pelting down, advance scouts for some grand enterprise we were proud to be part of but about which we knew nothing. How we clung to one another. Didn’t we? No. We each galloped forward as though alone. No. We stood, transfixed. No. A gull landed in the square and limped toward us; on its back, nestled across the strong brown wings, was a skinny white dog, a terrier.

  SPIRIT PATH

  The bellringer — remember him? — marker of our time, doler out of a greenish afternoon, slate-grey sleet-chill morning, items of our valley allowance, temporally speaking, did I say he was blind? Anyway, he has decided (it has been formally decided) that his apprentice will take over his afternoon bells while a village woman — Song Wei! — will lead him every day down from his eyrie, down from his nest in the trees, down from his knoll near the North Gate, down the path to the frigid shrine where I write, so he can take his place beside me and make his painstaking characters.

  He’s writing his memoirs (no kidding). Here he is, bent over, his cheek so close to the page that I’m afraid he’ll paint his terrible eyes, using a very fine brush to shape his story. (My body’s in turmoil. Song’s arm grazed mine when I helped her settle him at his table.) You have no inkling of his slowness. All the time he breathes into his gloved hands, little grunts of effort, and his tongue, ruddy and moist from a quick trip inside, points at me from the corner of his mouth.

  With his chin in his hand, he looks like a boy, the boy he was. And is that a tear or a trick of the light? He’s dreamy, in this poised state, like the heron — remember him? Perhaps this is the way he looks before releasing the timber to strike the bell. What is he reporting? Something deep and dark, no doubt, something of import to leave us when he dies.

  “What are you writing?” I ask.

  “The story of the bell.”

  “Ah. How can you write?”

  He makes no sign of having heard. But he is writing. Perhaps light is all that can confuse us, and he cannot see light. He commits his brush strokes with confidence.

  PENETRATING THE INTERIOR

  Dark that won’t brighten no matter what. No hills or mountains or sky. I remember being a boy with my mum and dad. I remember spending whole days with my wife and our son when we had a boy of our own. The two times get confused. Somebody threw somebody in the air and somebody gasped and somebody caught somebody. Hours at home preparing a script and going out to buy milk, then coming home to supper and a movie. Before bed someone was shouting. Blue-green anger surged under the busy engine, the family, until its parts flew apart, landing me here, bump skip bounce, arse over teakettle, fresh blood, ouch.

  YIN CLEFT

  Clothes drying around the storehouse braziers. No electricity because the lines are down, no doubt knocked out by a fallen branch or tree.

  My writing companion could not bear to abandon his bell, and he disliked being led by a woman, so Song Wei has been dismissed and it’s my job to fetch him as soon as I hear the first afternoon bell. He works away beside me, while I sit in meditation.

  It was almost night when I took him home to his hut. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What is it like to be blind?”

  “Dark. What does the world look like now?”

  “Dark.”

  “Are you going to the temple?”

  “I have been asked to watch the children.”

  “A good thing to do!” He nodded and I made my way down the slippery path and through the temple yard and past the warm storehouse.

  The children were making balls out of wet leaves and throwing them at one another. They ran along the shore of the swollen pond and wanted to be chased. Sparks from various fires streamed into the black sky. Geese burst into the valley and splashed down. The running and chasing churned a smell of rot from the earth. Then the children surged uphill and I followed: they were all splayed in the courtyard like flattened stars.

  At night prayers there was a smell of drying laundry. My chest and neck hurt. I had a sharp pain in my leg and lower back. I was sore all over, but almost warm. An owl hooted. The kids would be asleep. Not a whisper of wind and nothing in the sky.

  SPIRIT GATE

  The bellringer and I have moved into the library on the coldest wettest days since our pen and brush won’t make distinct shapes on soggy paper. The library braziers burn day and night, tended by two monks working in shifts. We all have aches now. Gall bladder and large intestine. Necks and shoulders. Jiushu monks will arrive next week. I fell asleep during Silken Movements. Dreamed of chopping down trees. I fell asleep when receiving a wood-and-metal release. Dreamed of that Norwegian hotel overlooking the three roads converging on the bridge where a river churned. Of course metal is the mother of water. Of course metal controls wood. Somewhere nearby is a drip, singular and significant in all the rain falling from heaven and from the tall bamboo.

  LESSER PALACE

  More storms then a break in the rain and an evening of stories, accounts of the time before rocks and rivers.

  LESSER RUSHING

  Who’s down there calling in the long cloud on the river? A swan, I think, a swan not yet white, a young swan in the mist, calling.

  Sky’s a dull dead screen. Not a young sky.

  Our son, when my wife and I separated, changed into someone I didn’t know, going to her place from mine and to my place from hers, no one to know what that was like but him. There were times at the door, his face pale, his eyes on mine for a moment before he leapt, wrapping his legs around my hips and burrowing there, young mammal, that provided all warmth to my marsupi
al heart. But what happened in that second it took to let him go?

  Yang Fire

  Lesser Marsh

  Water runs into wood. Smoke from braziers rises into stars burning above our heads. A fit of sneezing.

  FRONT VALLEY

  My blind brother waved his brush in the air. “What happened to the village woman, the one who used to bring me here?”

  “Song Wei?” I said. “It’s just as well you fired her. She’s pregnant. Her eyes are too bright, even though she tries to hide them.”

  He crouched over his table and dipped his brush in ink. “She is beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  “As beautiful as the American actress?” His lips curved. “Last year her scent was everywhere.”

  “Imogen and Song Wei are both beautiful,” I said.

  “Song Wei, Imogen,” he said. “You are naming people?”

  “Why not? The master has given me a new master.”

  “I don’t care. For me all women are clouds.” He screwed his face up, pursing his lips and tilting his head, sour, mischievous. “In America I was called Frank.”

  The jiushu monks arrived, tall and silent, their robes redolent of burnt mugwort, to ignite their tiny conical towers at bladder points along our spines. They arranged us in rows on the storehouse mats, set their beacons alight, and patrolled among us. Their seriousness was unnerving. But I felt warmer, with fewer aches, after my treatment.

  BACK CREEK

  “When struck,” Frank said, “the bell balances the Great and the Going Away, water and fire. She balances the blood. She was forged in mountains a thousand miles from here, in the heart of a land of warring kingdoms. The furnace pit roared and glowed for three days and four nights, and at the moment the bell lost its fluid nature, a boy was born in the palace across the river to a wild prince and the local princess, and when the bell was hung in the monastery peace came to the region.