A Year at River Mountain Read online

  “Well, I won’t last the year. And your mother’s crazy. Perhaps we are finished here.”

  It was very cold and the valley was full of snow and wind, snow blowing off the branches, and crows wheeling like bits of dark come loose from night and the bamboo bent under heavy crystals impossible to ignore.

  SKY WINDOW

  My life has been a steady journey here. Born in England, beginning of the war, I fought Germans and Japanese in schoolyard battles through the early fifties, and on weekends dreamed up elaborate conflicts where I was a solitary soldier in enemy territory, scaling hillsides, crouched behind rock outcrops, checking the sky and horizon for signs, men rising up before me, dark-coated and massive, wanting only to rend and devour, and telling myself one truth: they are like me, simple, unstoppable, hurt, visible, and knowable, while more waited, half-glimpsed in a night forest, full of cunning and bloodlust — other, elsewhere, not quite of this world — while I tried many escapes, sailed to New York with my parents, flew to Vancouver, back to a life at RADA, then London’s theatre hub, spokes to a host of plays and film shoots. You. You. You. Here.

  DECEMBER

  SKY HOOD

  IT TAKES AN HOUR FOR TWO BLACK HOLES to coalesce, and when they blend they groan, they sing, but light’s different, light from stars travels in waves, particles, silence. The shivering beggar under the bridge deck chants as he displays his broken weapons; children at his side dance like monkeys. It is a dark time of year to go home. There’s the bell. The bell is haunted. So the black hole and the black hole meet for an hour (their hotel has seen better days), and for an hour all heads incline, buildings lean, tides twitch, and then they return to their lives.

  Do you know the human gesture to protect us from life’s unmentionables? I don’t mean the head bowed in surrender; I don’t mean the reactive leap backward or the sucker-punch. Even as a child I saw the end of such goofy dramatics. Houses are built room by room, you learn the pattern, and in England as I watched my father brick up the back door and cut another facing south, I knew my fingers didn’t want to know the ins and outs of renovation based on someone else’s plan (Mum again). It seemed and still seems fickle, naively hopeful work. No, I’m talking about a personal gesture, subtle-like for the camera, almost a tic, but universal, too. What you are doing now while your eyes sweep over the gaps between the words looking for someone — she might wander from copse to lane and you might miss the moment — still carries me. There must be a gesture to let in what’s needed.

  CHEEK BONE CREVICE

  It was late when we crossed the bridge home. The master welcomed us in his hut and asked each of us to speak. After we’d finished, silence, and then he said, “A poet nun from North Valley will sing for us tomorrow evening.”

  Later I was walking the paths, looking for evidence of my nests and finding none, when Song Wei appeared through the trees. We bowed in the old way and she asked what I was looking for.

  “Birds,” I told her. “I’m looking for lost birds. So many species have vanished from the valley.”

  She stood watching me while every branch dripped and snow creaked under her feet. Was she beautiful? Oh, yes.

  PALACE OF HEARING

  My favourite pen is missing and I borrowed a brush from Frank. The snow has almost gone. When things are lost I despair of setting my feet on the ground. The madman is among us again, inside our grounds, screaming and laughing. Last night the bell rang after one outburst, then rang a second time, even though the timber had been double-tied and the knot was still secure this morning.

  Yang Water

  Bright Eyes

  All the nests are lost and the round stones set inside are scattered. Sometimes I wake in the morning straight into anguish about money, then realise it’s not money now but something else that’s scarce. And not hope or joy, but a subtle version of being here. I fashioned the nests too quickly and didn’t know what I was doing. The poet sang last night.

  GATHERED BAMBOO

  About snow and war and exile. Her voice thin as a child’s. And then the stage was empty again. Perhaps poetry is a way to empty things.

  My parents met at a dance hall called the Tin Bin during the war, a time young couples met at dances on Saturday nights. My father loved my mother steadily for seventy years, while her love for him, small at the outset, grew to a late crescendo. This is the simple version, the family version. I was born; my sister was born.

  When the number of players on the stage is exactly right, the audience relaxes. There is fullness. In the following silence, the distant murmur of a winter stream is all that’s needed.

  EYEBROW FLUSH

  The hill terraces are silver green, made flat by men for grain: there lentils, there rice; the valley bottom is flooding, snow at the margins, standing water black in the middle. The bell, certainly haunted, calls out, and echoes from the edge of the valley sound like a jazz trio — Bobo Stenson, Anders Jorman, Paul Motian — as they carry the vibration of the mother metal. Frank keeps to his hut and North Gate Shrine.

  Paths ascend from the valley north and south, but we do not use the south paths across the river. There have been terrible battles up and down those slopes. This is where Song’s rapists came from, and ghosts of thin warriors still drift like smoke among the trees. The north paths are beloved, well-travelled: we send monks with questions climbing the mountain, and from the mountain come answers.

  In a New World dream my father is driving east into the Rockies; behind him on the coast Mother’s burning through the second season of her show; they have had a ferocious battle about us kids. At the next motel, Dad turns on the TV and hears poems sung in a language he doesn’t understand, though he does understand such heartbreak. At the bathroom mirror he can’t cut through the whiskers on his cheeks, on his chin, even though the blade is new. His knuckles are sunburnt from the drive and he is lonely. Again and again he pulls the razor over his face, remembers England, each job, each child. The motel is like a private ward, despite the poems, and sleep’s a sudden blanket. He dreams of his son playacting, his daughter full of petulant secrecy as his wife, in her TV series, Three Becomes Four, gives birth to a new baby girl.

  The master sat in his winter robes across the small table in a corner of the storehouse library. We had the brazier for company, a stack of wood and the large north-facing window. Afternoon light energised the pattern on his wide sleeve — swirls of green and yellow — when his arm rose.

  “Why are you still here?” he said.

  We listened to the rushing stream outside.

  He looked over his shoulder, then down at his hands. “D’you think this valley needs outsiders?”

  Together we watched his rough thin restless hands chase each other.

  He smiled. “Once the bell was a stranger. I was pleased with your report.”

  Sun shone into the library. Webs high in the corners trembled.

  “When I was a boy I owned a fox,” he said. “I kept him in a wood cage and we travelled round the countryside. We were a single being. When we came to a town I set him free and we walked up and down the streets.”

  My throat, the muscles, thickened, and heat throbbed behind my eyes. “I belong here,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “But there is a wildness in you that does.” He waved his hand. “You are unaware of this.”

  I have the rest of the afternoon in the library to myself. Since he left, a woodpecker has been drumming from the grove of trees behind the storehouse. I write at the low table, listening to the fire’s crackling wood, while a flock of crows is busy in the trees. I am calm. Things can be forgotten. Purposely left behind. I no longer have the sense of impending disaster I have construed in myself variously as anxiety, worry, suspicion, doubt, self-criticism, paranoia.

  Imogen’s like a carefully wrapped orphan left in a basket on a river, back of winter. The current tugs at the basket as buds on the willows begin to swell.

  CROOKED CURVE

  The day was cold and my
hands numb, so I was hurrying along the path, on my way to a session with one of the settlement women, when I saw them. Mist lay across the river, dark on top and silver underneath, night already pushing in from the east so the trestle supports were invisible and the bridge deck seemed to float. An insubstantial world, then, with a stage.

  The man in a long grey coat was hunched over lighting a cigarette, intent on his cupped hands, and a boy, no doubt his son, was engaged in his own small stooping play. They seemed together yet entirely separate — loose from their tribe — on the platform in the mist. The man’s hand wavered a moment above his son’s head. This was it, you see, the gesture: a kind of roof, as simple as that.

  The settlement woman had been suffering from a month-long headache. Her husband had recently fallen and could not work, her grown son was returned from a failed endeavour in the port, and her younger children were hungry. Fire point in gall bladder. Water point in liver. Gall Bladder-38 Yangfu. Liver-8 Ququan.

  FIFTH PLACE

  Up from the pupil of the eye, halfway to the crown of the head. A point through which the bladder looks up at the sky. Clouds like a ploughed grey field. Hold with right middle finger.

  Second point Mingmen, Gate of Life, ministerial fire, on the spine just below the second lumbar vertebra. Hold with the left middle finger.

  Zhou Yiyuan stood at the door.

  “Nothing for a farmer to do,” he said. “It’s all done. A cup of wine. A cup of thick wine. Nothing else to plant, nothing to harvest. A cup of thick wine.”

  Drop left finger down to Du-3 Yaoyangguan. Lumbar Yang Gate. To dispel wind-damp.

  RECEIVING LIGHT

  The high slopes pure white. The sun-filled room cold without fire. What was lost came home in another form (a lost girl, love between father and son, a point, the master’s fox, my pen) as I worked on her migraine. The session cut short because her baby was screaming. As she nursed I stood behind her and held Yang White, both sides, and looked down at the swirls of black hair on the infant’s head. She told me when I enquired that Song Wei was ill.

  Babies are difficult to dislodge. I listened to ice in the river, then to the nearby knocking of men strengthening or repairing roofs. Momentary wind through the trees outside.

  HEAVENLY CONNECTION

  It snowed in the night and my past seemed far away, just a white shimmer out there in the bamboo. One of the babies cried at dawn amid the murmur of prayer; then the bell rang. Snow has flattened every blade of grass yet the young bamboo springs back if given a vigorous shake. I met a village couple on the temple path, an infant tied to the woman’s belly, the man carrying a bundle of sticks. Tonight it’s bright in the library. I am grass. How is Song Wei?

  REFUSING CONNECTION

  Toward the end of the short day, a monk was etching the margin of the bamboo forest, carefully picking his way through the white drifts at the shore of a long frozen puddle, dragging the old bamboo rake. He paused, then turned to look behind him.

  Zhou Yiyuan lurched to catch up and as they met, both swayed, off balance, each leaning away from the other— A moment of great stress. Enough of routines, practices, observances and rituals, a new pattern is emerging! The healing line, true for seven hundred years, is faltering. Wood. Water. Wood. Water creates wood. Water is the daughter of metal, grandmother of fire.

  Zhou Yiyuan pushed the monk into the bamboo, then turned in slow motion and strode uphill through fat drifts.

  Once upon a time when I was a boy I ran naked down a road in the middle of a summer night to a rough beach, tide high and black, choppy waves rolling in every direction, and leapt from an outcrop into the sea.

  JADE PILLOW

  My only non-actor friend in Vancouver was a forensic social worker whose job was to ascertain mental competency and make psychiatric recommendations for men who had committed violent crimes. The day before Jake drove me to the airport, on my way here, one of his clients had lifted a hammer from a shelf in a hardware store and bludgeoned four shoppers, so Jake was distracted. “The big figures of madness,” he said, “the Caesars, Christs, Hitlers never surface any more, what with the availability and the power of the new drugs!”

  Something is broken. Something is leaking, this world into that, that into this. I don’t know. Do you? Tree branches now cracked will soon be torn away. New buds shrivel on the fallen branches. Time freezes the apples left for winter birds. Space is altered since I saw what I saw. The valley is filling with snow. The bell is haunted. The man screams in the night, though it’s hard to tell whether it’s a man or a child or a lost animal. Perhaps it is a baby crying. I dreamed of another baby girl, this one safely tied in a tree by her mother, using her own coarse black hair, wrapped against the cold and out of the reach of dangerous men, yet terrified and alone.

  Morning has been quiet, but now there’s wind on the river striating the mercuric surface, rushing through the lake fields, and birds wheel in the next teeming storm.

  CELESTIAL PILLAR

  The baby trussed up in the tree will not leave me alone. Now she sucks her thumb and watches massive white clouds with black bellies roll in from the southwest above the portion of the road and river she can see from her branch. Her mother must have forgotten her by now.

  There’s news of military activity on the southern plains; there are rumours of government spies in the region. Snow has buried the pile of refuse that clings to the village site, which a year ago was meadow verging rice paddy.

  I was walking the snow-path at the edge of the settlement, trying to think what the master might want (he has told me we will speak tomorrow), when I met Zhou Yiyuan.

  “Is your sister well?” I asked.

  “You are not used to fighting,” he said, his breath pluming.

  “I saw what happened to her,” I said. “What could I have done?”

  “Interfered,” he said.

  “I heard she was sick. Is she all right?”

  We stood in snow-filled hills, hammered by cold wind. I had the sense I was very small and must make the most of every moment, no matter what the content. The valley seemed infected with crime.

  GREAT SHUTTLE

  Chainsaws work the fallen trees. They’ve been running for days now, little gas engines needling the air, sectioning the old pines felled by wind and heavy snow.

  “These strangers are wild people,” the master said. “I wonder if they wish to remain wild.” He sat near the fire. The bell sounded, muffled by the falling snow. But for the tinkling coals and his raspy breath, we had been in silence for a long time. He cocked his head, listening. “It is as though our bones are singing.” His head fell, his chin resting on his chest. Then he twitched, and his head rose again. “You are going to tell me,” he said in a low voice. “You are going to tell me what has happened. Wait.” He looked straight ahead, his eyes half-closed, a frail smile on his lips, and when he spoke again, his voice was brittle. “What is that?” He pointed into the shadows.

  My pen lying against the wall.

  I retrieved it and wiped off the dust.

  “I have received a letter from the actress,” he said. “I would like you to respond. Where is it? Wait.” He leaned forward. “Tell me the point in River Mountain that will heal what has been broken. No. First tell me what you have done.”

  Shame burned like frost on my skin. I clutched my pen but wasn’t able to say anything.

  This afternoon the ink flows too quickly. Each word threatens to become a small pond, the nib skating lightly, isolate letters inflating themselves. It is as though I am not where I am. Just now, while walking in the woods at the correct moment doing the precise chore the way I’ve been taught, my head filled with light and my eyes wouldn’t focus and the world tilted. It feels as though I’ve been telling lies, doing something I have no right to do. I’m someone I have no right to be.

  A monk brought the letter to me in the library a moment ago. Imogen has read an Internet blog about the one-point technique and says we must guard our sec
rets so they do not spill into the social media. Ironic, really, because she has been a factor in our exposure; her fame has already drawn attention to us. She wants to know if she will still find our order intact when she returns next year. Do we need money? I am to write to her in the master’s name, saying yes to the money, and reassuring her that she will find all she seeks in our valley.

  WIND GATE

  The biggest storm yet kept us awake all night. In the dark an army of demons screamed and tore at the buildings. The bell rang of its own accord. Trees crashed at the edge of the frozen fields, and this morning four of the oldest pines were lying, roots in the air, obliterating the unused East Gate. No power. Still dim at midday, with cold air from the north and its smell of snow.

  I must think how to phrase my response to Imogen’s letter, to settle her mind about the monastery and its destiny, to say we are calm, unaffected by chaos. Calm? In fact, we are all freezing to death. I hope to God it’s warm where you are. The problem is always how to trace a path from one unknown toward another, how shade the closing distance, and do it all without hesitation. Even when subject and object are in place and all that remains to be found is the verb, I’m in a cold sweat. I can’t stop shivering and my knees lock and I can’t find my feet. I feel as though I’m translating every word from my father’s dead language that I only heard when I was too young to understand it.

  Tomorrow will you walk with me along the river and help me find the valley point to balance all discrepancies? If you do, I’ll write the letter.

  LUNG SHU

  We had a winter meeting, monks and villagers, and several elders spoke. I had something to say, but when I tried I could not utter a word. Back in my stage days it was necessary when facing a large crowd to lose focus, just for a second, in order to find my lines and the audience in the same room. Now when I lose focus all I feel is danger. The acting world is not the world of contemplation. The last time I stood in front of a panel of doctors it did not go well. The air thronged with questions, all unasked, all mine.