A Year at River Mountain (22 page)

Our story, yours and mine, when I tell the master, will change everything.

S
USPENDED
L
OCK

Happiness. I love paths that feet have made and felt such joy descending the worn stone steps from the mountain after a climb to see the meadow flowers. While walking I thought about houses and theatres and banks and office buildings — how much of my time used to be spent indoors, looking out of windows — then I wandered through the monastery to the river and along the climbing bank and fell asleep on the red cliff, high above the torrent.
Sun and cloud
. Woke in warm sun, the air claggy with pollen; deer flowed through the bamboo: the shadows of deer: antlers and their echoes. A far-off sneeze. Down at the river, tiny green waves.

T
EMPLE
C
ROOK

“It will be cosy at home. What about it, buddy-boy? Will we light a fire and get some tea going? Hold your sister's hand.” My father said such a thing after a failed meeting with Mum, before we left England, when we were caught in a storm and had to wait a long time for the bus. The three of us miserable and alone, about to leave our world. I missed my father when he died. What I remember most vividly is not what he said, but once in a while feeling him behind me and backing into his legs.

The temperature plunged in the night. Smoke hung in the tops of trees and a veil of rain chilled my skin as we went in to chant the middle of the day.

I'm once again ensconced at West Shrine, waiting for something indistinct, the end of time, the end of our time. Up ahead is the end of my time, round a couple of corners and down that little hill. Perhaps soon. I missed my father and now I miss the old master. Why have I not spoken to Frank? The boats and rafts multiply daily. Has war consumed the rest of the world?

L
EADING
V
ALLEY

When the earth began to shake, water spurted from the well and packed dirt lapped the stone sides and ground waves tossed the long boulders into the west plums. Monks and families flew uphill. The storehouse groaned. Above the liquid earth the air was thunderous and thick with cherry blossom. Petals suspended. Earth's weather an ordinary mirage: counterfeit: will all be as it was? How can anything groundless be this beautiful? When I looked, the river was fat, a series of silver crests undulating upstream. On my hand a wound and a moss-green stain. Then part of the mountain fell in a splintering of trees.

S
KY
R
USHING

Before dawn, among secondary tremors, the villagers cleared the ground inside the temple walls of debris and erected a tarp. They carried the bodies of their tribe up and lay them beneath the tarp, beside the dead monks. No one since the ancient battles has witnessed a morning like this. A long eerie silence ended with perpetual traffic teetering along the valley road, military trucks, ambulances, fire engines, buses, flatbeds with equipment, while above our heads helicopters scavenged. River-tumbled bodies. Rocking barges of injured and dying. Aftershocks. Our white-eyed fear.

A day like this is unimaginable until it dawns, brimming with its own reality, the stillest day, the sky crystal blue, warm spring sun on our shoulders. We have broken bones, bruises and cuts. Who did not fall? Still standing are the temple walls, the shrines, the bridge, most of our huts, the bathhouse. A hundred and forty-seven humans, on whose faces grief blooms like a fungus. Our heads down.

F
LOATING
W
HITE

Shock. Aftershock.

Y
IN
P
ORTALS OF THE
H
EAD

Memory cannot cope with this agony. From an inconceivable perspective this looks normal, like old documentary footage:
One moment the doctors were crossing the lawn toward the annex, the next they were on their backs, coughing in the thick dust, and the annex was gone.
How simply and quickly we lose speech and only the effort of digging and carrying makes sense. Every muscle aches. We unearth people, one after another, after they are dead. I tweak this one's ear or stroke that one's shaved head, and settle their broken limbs. Living children tumble into my arms. A goat kid stands in a cloud of dust and bleats as if he has been carrying the world on his back and it has almost defeated him.

M
ASTOID
P
ROCESS

The cave ceremony is underway again, despite the grumbling earth, the same monks who prepared the old master's body prepare the new master's body. A more public funeral continues outside the temple in steady sun amid visiting dignitaries and politicians and impatient journalists.

A woman in a white business suit clutched her microphone, stepped onto the bridge and posed in front of the camera. “The river floods its banks, the monks chant, and behind that broken temple wall — ” pointing over her shoulder “ — are the bodies of monks and refugees killed in the earthquake . . . ”

R
OOT OF THE
SP
IRIT

We are
Suiji.Suiji
. Song Wei's son who drowned. We are now all
Suiji
.

Aftershocks and the sound of timbers groaning in the night woke me over and over from dreams of rubble in smashed bamboo, the faces of the dead, and finally at dawn a perfect tile roof upside down on the ground. At standing prayers a small wind blew centuries of dust and today's yellow pollen gently down from the trees.

It will rain tonight. The well is broken and the river unfit to drink so we carry water from North Spring. Thirty-two dead, eight children, twelve women, twelve men.

We still hold the daily points; I continue, at West Shrine, any time of day or night, to record.

Y
ANG
W
HITE

The villagers formed a circle in the courtyard around the collapsed well and chanted a prayer in voices I didn't recognise as human.

The dead faces are in the clouds and trees, branches wet from so much rain, eyes immaculate as if catastrophe and deluge have taken turns stirring the pot. Dirty water drips off the bamboo leaves into ruts in the ground, their edges yellow with pollen. Barrel rims also yellow, and crows and old women screaming.

H
EAD
O
VERLOOKING
T
EARS

A child sat up in her mother's arms and sucked her thumb. Side by side, no longer with us, lay the dead children. The women keened all day and then the village men, too, began to howl. Trees without end on the south hills.

E
YE
W
INDOW

The muscles in my face are rigid. The ground continues to heave. I continue to write, but why? I have never heard or seen anything like this, and it feels as if my nightmares are awake and roaming the valley and I'm close to naming all I have lost. Spring thaw has coincided with the largest quake in centuries, and it is too much. Too much snow, too much rain for the river to handle. When cracks appeared it was too late to run and many died standing up, facing tumbling rocks as big as shrines. And yet I'm left alive, for now, to imagine the river sparkling in summer sun, Imogen stepping off the bridge.

U
PRIGHT
C
ONSTRUCTION

Time has turned seven hundred years inside out, and manuscripts, ledgers, records, paintings, are gone. Our storehouse is gone. Morning wind tore apart the scarecrow erected by the villagers to guard the temple and flying straw stung our faces.

Let me count my feet, my toes on the ground. It's sunrise. Earth is quiet. Thirty geese arrow west, wavering north then south then north above the bodies of the dead. Sun has returned and the valley is beautiful, new leaves unfurling from plum branches. Blue crow flies through the tallest trees, a hint of black fruit.

I stood earlier among the rows of monks, and the valley seemed a thin place, a narrow place, a single point among countless points. As we filed out of the roofless temple, we began to cry. We heard an answering scream from the forest. Between two roots of a massive curved tree was the crazy elder holding a baby wrapped in silk rags. Without question it was Song's baby, a tiny girl with her mother's features. The old woman murmuring, “She should not be on the ground; she should not be on the earth.”

S
UPPORT
S
PIRIT

The young master is dead. Zhou Yiyuan has disappeared. Song Wei is dead and here was her baby in Frank's arms. The old bellringer wore a white robe and had a damaged ankle and had himself to be carried along the path, a monk on either side. A lovely spring day, showers and sun, the five elements in balance. It was a sight to witness, take stock of, the two men conducting the old man cradling the baby girl down the winding path from the ruined temple. When they stopped, I kneeled and touched Frank's feet for not being dead. He rocked the baby, gently shaking his bruised head. The bamboo heavy with rain, the lateral stems hung with silver droplets.

I used to think you loved me. A good review kept me buoyant for days. When things fall into chaos this fast, every twig and root you grasp on your way down snaps clean. And if nights are a bounty of failure, days are hopeful because of scudding clouds, hours of sun and singing birds.

The work now contemplates us as we stack the salvaged items, burn the damaged and useless, shift the manageable rocks and stones from the grounds. The first laugh from the village relieved everything, and
lift
was tangible when the night bell was struck. I experienced it with you once or twice, this lift. Laughter has thrown a bridge to the recently dead, and the result is a quick strand between sky and earth, almost invisible, drifting in wind that has freshness in it.

Supplies arrive tomorrow. Chainsaws wail in the rubble. This afternoon ministers and prefects crossed the river to assess the damage and to be photographed with monks and wreckage. Deputations of builders have been dispatched from cities across the plain. This morning five boys, their heads already shaved, showed up at North Gate. Five more stepped off crowded barges an hour ago.

B
RAIN
H
OLLOW

Morning birds were singing and I was thinking coffee, coffee and a cigarette, maybe a shot of whisky. Past the broken well and the fallen storehouse to the temple to the minor west shrine. Through half-closed lids, I saw in the distance the stranger, the spy, the father, alone under the warrior tree. He sat quietly and a small girl, one of the new orphans, darted through the outer gate and clambered into his lap, and I knew he had lost everything.

It is not easy to count to thirty-two. It took me the rest of the day. At dusk a twig fell from a stone. Rather: a signal caught my eye: a shift in the fabric, that twinkle again. Thirty-two birds had gone to roost; now only one held forth, a song for each of our fallen, for each of our dead. The girl in the man's arms was knocking on his head; when he looked at her and let her go, she climbed into the warrior tree, into the branches above him; it was too dark to make out anything else.

It was always important, was it not, to imagine carefully, get a sense of how we all fit together, actors, audience, stage manager, lighting designer, director, writer? Thirty-two is sixty-four parents and one hundred and twenty-eight grandparents.

W
IND
P
OOL

Above the temple North Spring still flows as clear as ever (Spring at the Crook, Liver-8,
He
-Sea and water point). We all gathered this morning to hold Wind Pool and Spring at the Crook, wood yin and yang, before we began to collect our water for the day. From Frank's mound (Gall Bladder-34, Yang Mound Spring, a heavenly star point) the extent of the ruins is a new surprise.

A blue wave sloshed in my bucket as I trudged the temple path (they were building straw beds in the temple and preparing fires) to the storehouse courtyard, past the guests and through the gates, and down to the bridge to cleanse the river. I set down the bucket and made a wish. The wave spiralled briefly green into the brown turbulence. There were vultures in the grey sky and wounds on the inside of my fingers. When I lifted my head smoke was filtering through the bamboo to join towering grey clouds.

S
HOULDER
W
ELL

“We must nourish blood and yin.”

I and three others carried bucket after bucket from the spring down to where the old women were cooking rice for visitors, monks and villagers. At the cave the death monks were chanting. We gathered, the monks from this and other monasteries and the people from villages in the region, the abbots and politicians from capital cities, at the edge of the forest.

“Will you leave?” Frank asked.

“I can't leave now.”

“I might leave.”

“And go where?”

“How is the question.”

“You can't go.”

“Not yet. But I forget what I was doing here. It's fading. I forgot to bless those I could have blessed. Who do you wish you had blessed?”

At the cave they were chanting. Frank and I turned in that direction and, just like my lonesome and foolish father, as unready as him, I thought of obligation and obedience.

“My son,” I said. “My parents and sister, Song Wei, her baby, Zhou Yiyuan. You, Frank. The old master, the young master. Imogen.”

“Maybe I'll go with the homeless,” he said.

M
AY

H
OLD THE BABY AND HER FACE TILTS AS
though she sees something above, her mouth opens — something to say? — star-hands float from her body, and she grows heavy. I look down into her blue eyes and lose where I am in favour of someplace I've never been, though it is familiar. Here's a split, a fracture, now the valley has cracked open, but my heart can't squeeze out of my chest since there's no wound, not yet. I'm falling and want to soar.

Rain began to tick on the ground. Outside the shrine the old woman smiled up,
Give me the child
, and made rocking motions with her cradling arms and I passed her the baby.