Authors: David Mitchell
My nephew stared at the bottle of rice wine. He had always supported the communists. “It’s Comrade Mao’s wife’s doing! She was just an actress, but now all this power has gone to her head! You can’t trust people who lie for a living.”
“I’m going back to my Tea Shack,” I said. “And I’m never coming down from the Holy Mountain again. Visit me sometimes, Cousin, when your ankles let you climb the path. You’ll know where to find me.”
• • •
The eye was high above. It disguised itself as a shooting star, but it didn’t fool me, for what shooting star travels in a straight line and never burns itself out? It was not a blind lens, no: it was a man’s eye, looking down at me from the cobwebbed dimness, the way they do. Who were they, and what did they want of me?
I can hear the smile in my Tree’s voice. “Extraordinary! How do you tune yourself in to these things?”
“What do you mean?”
“It hasn’t even been launched yet!”
Once again, I rebuilt my Tea Shack. I glued Lord Buddha back together with sticky sap. The world didn’t end, but hell did empty itself into China and the world was bathed in evil that year. Stories came up the path, from time to time, brought by refugees with relatives at the summit. Stories of children denouncing their parents, and becoming short-lived national celebrities. Truckloads of doctors, lawyers, and teachers being trucked to the countryside to be reeducated by peasants in Correction Camps. The peasants didn’t know what they were supposed to teach, the Correction Camps were never built in time for the class enemies’ arrival, and the Red Guard sent to guard them slowly grew desperate as they realized that they had been sent into exile along with their captives. These Red Guard were children from Beijing and Shanghai, soft with city living. Brain had been denounced as a Dutch spy, and sent to an Inner Mongolian prison. Even Mao’s architects of his Cultural Revolution were denounced, their names reviled in the next wave of official news from Beijing. What kind of a place was the capital, where such things were loosed from their cages? The cruelest of the ancient emperors were kittens alongside this madman.
No monks prayed, no temple bells rang, not for many seasons.
As the guide told his foreign devil, it was all too evil.
Summers, autumns, winters, and springs swung round and around. I never went down to the Village. The winters were sharp-fanged, to be sure, but the summers were bountiful. Clouds
of purple butterflies visited my upstairs room during the mornings, when I hung out the washing. The mountain cat had kittens. They became semitame.
A handful of monks returned to live at the summit of the Holy Mountain, and the Party authorities didn’t seem to notice. One morning I awoke to find a letter pushed under the door of my Tea Shack. It was from my daughter—a
letter
, and a photograph, in color! I had to wait until a monk came by, because I can’t read, but this is what it said:
Dear Mother,
I’ve heard that some short letters are being allowed through at the moment, so I’m trying my luck. As you can see from the photograph, I’m almost a middle-aged woman now. The young woman to my left is your granddaughter, and do you see the baby she is holding? She is your great-granddaughter! We are not rich, and since my husband died we lost the lease on his restaurant, but my daughter cleans foreigners’ apartments and we manage to live well enough. I hope one day we can meet on the Holy Mountain. Who knows? The world is changing. If not, we will meet in heaven. My stepfather told me stories about your mountain when he was alive. Have you ever been to the top? Perhaps you can see Hong Kong from there! Please look after yourself. I shall pray for you. Please pray for me.
A trickle of pilgrims slowly grew to a steady flow. I could afford to buy chickens, and a copper pan, and a sack of rice to see me through the winter. More and more foreigners came up the path: hairy ones, puke-colored ones, black ones, pinko-gray ones. Surely they’re letting too many in? Foreigners mean money, though. They have so much of it. You tell them a bottle of water is twenty yuan, and often they’ll pay up without even doing us the courtesy of haggling! That’s downright rude!
A day passed nearby, not long ago. In summer, I hire out the upstairs room for people to sleep in. I set up my father’s hammock
in the kitchen downstairs and sleep in that. I don’t like doing it, but I have to save money for my funeral, or in case a famine returns. I can make more money from a foreigner this way than in a whole week of selling noodles and tea to real people. This night a foreigner was staying, and a real man and his wife and son from Kunming. The foreigner couldn’t speak. He communicated in gestures like a monkey. Night had come. I’d boarded up the Tea Shack, and lay in the hammock waiting for sleep to come. My visitors’ son couldn’t sleep, so the mother was telling him a story. It was a pretty story, about three animals who think about the fate of the world.
Suddenly, the foreigner speaks! In real words! “Excuse me, where did you hear that story first? Please try to remember!”
The mother is as surprised as me. “My mother told it to me when I was a little girl. Her mother told it to her. She was born in Mongolia.”
“Where in Mongolia?”
“I only know she was born in Mongolia. I don’t know where.”
“I see. I’m sorry for troubling you.”
He clunks around. He comes downstairs and asks me to let him out.
“I’m not giving you a refund, you know,” I warn him.
“That doesn’t matter. Good-bye. I wish you well.”
Strange words! But he is determined to leave, so I slide the bolts and swing open the door. The night is starry, without a moon. The foreigner was upbound, but he leaves downbound. “Where are you going?” I blurt out.
The mountain, forest, and darkness close their doors on him.
“What’s up with him?” I ask my Tree.
My Tree has nothing to say, either.
————
“Mao is dead!”
My Tree told me first, one morning of bright showers. Later an upbound monk burst into my Tea Shack, his face brimming over with joy, and confirmed the news.
“I tried to buy some rice wine to celebrate, but everybody had the same idea, and not a drop could be bought anywhere. Some
people spent the night sobbing. Some spent the night telling everybody to prepare for the invasion from the Soviet Union. The Party people spent the night hiding behind closed shutters. But most of the villagers spent the night celebrating, and setting off fireworks.”
I climbed to the upstairs room, where a young girl was sleepless with fear. I knew she was a spirit, because the moonlight shone through her, and she couldn’t hear me properly. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “The Tree will protect you. The Tree will tell you when to run and when to hide.” She looked at me. I sat on the chest at the end of my bed and sang her the only lullaby I know, about a cat, a coracle, and a river running around.
It was a kind year. One by one, the temples were rebuilt, and their bells rehung, so the sun and the moon could be properly greeted, and Lord Buddha’s birthday celebrated. Monks became commonplace visitors again, and the flow of pilgrims increased to dozens in a single day. Fat people were whisked by on stretchers, carried by teams of two or three men. A pilgrimage by stretcher? As pointless as a pilgrimage by car! Chicken-brains who still believed in politics talked in excited voices about the Four Modernizations, the trial of the Gang of Four, and a benign spirit come to save China called Deng Xiaoping. He could have as many modernizations as he wanted as long as he left my Tea Shack alone. The slogan of Deng Xiaoping was this: “To Become Rich is Glorious!”
The eye of Lord Buddha opened at the summit of the Holy Mountain on several occasions, and the monks lucky enough to witness this miracle leapt off the precipice, through the double rainbow, and landed on their feet in Paradise. Another miracle happened above my head. My Tree decided to have children. One autumn morning, I found it growing almonds. Higher up, hazelnuts. I could scarcely believe this miracle, but I was seeing it with my own eyes! A branch rustled higher up still, and a persimmon dropped at my feet. A week later I found windfallen quinces, and lastly, wrinkled, tart apples. As I slept the Tree creaked, and the music of dulcimers lit the path of dreams.
• • •
I dreamed of my father in the dark place where it hurt. I looked into the dripping pond near the cave, and he was looking back up at me, forlornly, with his hands tied behind his head. Sometimes when I was preparing tea for guests I could hear him in the upstairs room, shuffling around, looking for cigarettes and coughing. Lord Buddha explained that he was wracked with guilt, and that his soul was locked in a cage of unfinished business, down in the dim places. There it would stay until I went on a pilgrimage of my own up to the summit.
Make no mistake, I think my father was Emperor Chickenshit. Finding virtue in him was harder than finding a needle in the Yangtze River. He never spoke a word of kindness or thanks to me, and he sold my chastity for two tea bowls. But, he was my father, and the souls of the ancestors are the responsibility of the descendants. Besides, I wanted a good night’s sleep without his self-pity whining its way into my dreams. Lastly, it would be discourteous of me to spend this life working on the Holy Mountain without once making the pilgrimage to the summit. I was of the age when old women wake up bedbound, to discover their last day of moving around as they wished had been the day before, and they hadn’t even known it.
It was a fine morning before the rainy season. I rose with the sun. My Tree gave me some food. I boarded up the Tea Shack, hid my strongbox under a pile of rocks at the back of the cave, and set off upbound. Fifty years before I could have reached the summit before dark. At my age, I wouldn’t arrive before the afternoon of the following day.
Steps, gulleys, steps, mighty trees, steps, paths clinging to the rim of the world.
Steps in sunlight, steps in shadow.
When evening fell I lit a fire in the porch of a ruined monastery. I slept under my winter shawl. Lord Buddha sat at the end of my bed, smoking, and watching over me, as he does all pilgrims. When I awoke I found a bowl of rice, and a bowl of oolong tea, still steaming.
• • •
I stumbled into a future lifetime. There were hotels, five and six floors high! Shops sold glittery things that nobody could ever use, want, or need. Restaurants sold food that smelt of things I’d never smelt before. There were rows of huge buses with colored glass, and every last person on board was a foreign devil! Cars crowded and honked their horns like herds of swine. A box with people in it flew through air, but nobody seemed surprised. It breathed like the wind in the cave. I passed by a crowded doorway and looked in. A man was on a stage kissing a silver mushroom. Behind him was a screen with pictures of lovers and words. Somewhere in the room a monster hog was having its bollocks lopped off. Then I realized the man was singing! Singing about love, the southern breeze, and pussy willows.
I was nearly knocked over by a stretcher-bearer, carrying a foreign woman who wore sunglasses even though there wasn’t any sun.
“Watch where you’re standing,” he gasped.
“Which way is the summit of the Holy Mountain?” I asked.
“You’re standing on it!”
“Here?”
“Here!”
“Where’s the temple? You see, I need to offer prayers for the repose of—”
“There!” He pointed with a nod.
The temple was smothered in bamboo scaffolding. Workmen teemed up and down ladders, along platforms. A group of them were playing football in the forecourt, using statues of ancient monks as goals. I walked up close to the goalkeeper to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me again.
“My, my, it’s General Brain of the Red Guard!”
“Who the fuck are you, old woman?”
“The last time we met you were standing on my throat and getting quite turned on, I remember. You smashed up my Tea Shack and stole my money.”
He recognized me but pretended not to, and turned away, muttering darkly. At that moment the ball shot past him and a shout of victory rang out through the mist.
“This is a pleasant coincidence, isn’t it, General Brain? You’re a cunning one, I’ll give you that. First, you’re the head of a team to smash the temples to bits. Then, you’re the foreman of a team sent to restore them! Is this socialist modernization?”
“How do you know I’m the foreman?”
“Because even when you’re shirking off work you give yourself the easiest job.”
Brain’s face couldn’t decide what to do. It kept flitting from one expression to another. Some of the workers had overheard me, and were looking at their foreman askance. I left him, picking my way through the sawing and hammering at the temple gate. Grudges are demons that gnaw away your bone marrow. Time was already doing a good enough job of that. Lord Buddha has often told me that forgiveness is vital to life. I agree. Not for the well-being of the forgiven, though, but for the well-being of the forgiver.
I passed through the great doorway, and stood in the cloisters, wondering what to do next. An elderly monk with a misshaped nose walked up to me. “You’re the lady who owns the Tea Shack, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Then you shall be my guest! Come to the Sanctuary for a bowl of tea.”
I hesitated.
“Please. Don’t be nervous. You are very welcome here.”
An apprentice monk in his saffron robe was dabbing gold leaf onto Lord Buddha’s eyebrow. He looked at me, and smiled. I smiled back. Somewhere, a jackhammer was pounding the pavement and an electric drill buzzed up and down.
I followed the monk through a maze of cloisters smelling of incense and cement dust. We came to a quiet place. There were some statues of Lord Buddha, and some hanging scrolls. The tea was waiting for us in the empty room. “What do the scrolls say?”
The monk smiled modestly. “Calligraphy. It’s an idle hobby of mine. The one on the left:
In the sunlight on my desk
,
I write a long, long letter
.
and on the right: