Lamb (19 page)

(We had long since lost our surprise and outrage at graven images. The world at large and the art we had seen in our travels served to dampen even that grave commandment. “Bacon,” Joshua said when I asked him about it.)

This great room was the source of the chanting we had been hearing since entering the monastery, and after seeing the monks’ cells we determined that there must be at least twenty monks adding their voices to the droning, although the way the cave echoed it might have been one or a thousand. As we approached the statue, trying to ascertain what sort of stone it was made from, it opened its eyes.

“Is that you, Joshua?” it said in perfect Aramaic.

“Yes,” said Joshua.

“And who is this?”

“This is my friend, Biff.”

“Now he will be called Twenty-one, when he needs to be called, and you shall be Twenty-two. While you are here you have no name.” The statue wasn’t a statue, of course, it was Gaspar. The orange light of the candles and his complete lack of motion or expression had only made him appear to be made of stone. I suppose we were also thrown off because we were expecting a Chinese. This man looked as if he was from India. His skin was even darker than ours and he wore the red dot on his head that we had seen on Indian traders in Kabul and Antioch. It was difficult to tell his age, as he had no hair or beard and there wasn’t a line in his face.

“He’s the Messiah,” I said. “The Son of God. You came to see him at his birth.”

Still no expression from Gaspar. He said, “The Messiah must die if you are to learn. Kill him tomorrow.”

“’Scuse me?” I said.

“Tomorrow you will learn. Feed them,” said Gaspar.

Another monk, who looked almost identical to the first monk, came out of the dark and took Joshua by the shoulder. He led us out of the chapel chamber and back to the cells where he showed Joshua and me our accommodations. He took our satchels away from us and left. He returned in a few minutes with a bowl of rice and a cup of weak tea for each of us. Then he went away, having said nothing since letting us in.

“Chatty little guy,” I said.

Joshua scooped some rice into his mouth and grimaced. It was cold and unsalted. “Should I be worried about what he said about the Messiah dying tomorrow, do you think?”

“You know how you’ve never been completely sure whether you were the Messiah or not?”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow, if they don’t kill you first thing in the morning, tell them that.”

The next morning Number Seven Monk awakened Joshua and me by whacking us in the feet with a bamboo staff. To his credit, Number Seven was smiling when I finally got the sleep cleared from my eyes, but that was really a small consolation. Number Seven was short and thin with high cheekbones and widely set eyes. He wore a long orange robe woven from rough cotton and no shoes. He was clean-shaven and his head was also shaved except for a small tail that grew out at the crown and was tied with a string. He looked as if he could be anywhere from seventeen to thirty-five years old, it was impossible to tell. (Should you wonder about the appearance of Monks Two through Six, and Eight through Twenty, just imagine Number Seven Monk nineteen times. Or at least that’s how they appeared to me for the first few months. Later, I’m sure, except that we were taller and round-eyed, Joshua and I, or Monks Twenty-one and Twenty-two, would have fit the same description. When one is trying to shed the bonds of ego, a unique appearance is a liability. That’s why they call it a “uniform.” But alas, I’m getting ahead of myself.)

Number Seven led us to a window that was obviously used as a latrine, waited while we used it, then took us to a small room where Gas
par sat, his legs crossed in a seemingly impossible position, with a small table before him. The monk bowed and left the room and Gaspar asked us to sit down, again in our native Aramaic.

We sat across from him on the floor—no, that’s not right, we didn’t actually sit, we lay on the floor on our sides, propped up on one elbow the way we would have been at the low tables at home. We sat after Gaspar produced a bamboo staff from under the table and, with a motion as fast as a striking cobra’s, whacked us both on the side of the head with it. “I said sit!” he said.

Then we sat.

“Jeez,” I said, rubbing the knot that was swelling over my ear.

“Listen,” Gaspar said, holding the stick up to clarify exactly what he meant.

We listened as if they were going to discontinue sound any second and we needed to stock up. I think I even stopped breathing for a while.

“Good,” said Gaspar, laying the stick down and pouring tea into three simple bowls on the table.

We looked at the tea sitting there, steaming—just looked at it. Gaspar laughed like a little boy, all the graveness and authority from a second ago gone from his face. He could have been a benevolent older uncle. In fact, except for the obviously Indian features, he reminded me a lot of Joseph, Joshua’s stepfather.

“No Messiah,” Gaspar said, switching to Chinese now. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Joshua and I said in unison.

In an instant the bamboo stick was in his hand and the other end was bouncing off of Joshua’s head. I covered my own head with my arms but the blow never came.

“Did I strike the Messiah?” Gaspar asked Joshua.

Joshua seemed genuinely perplexed. He paused, rubbing the spot on his head, when another blow caught him over his other ear, the sound of the impact sharp and harsh in the small stone room.

“Did I strike the Messiah?” Gaspar repeated.

Joshua’s dark brown eyes showed neither pain nor fear, just confusion as deep as the confusion of a calf who has just had its throat cut by the Temple priest.

The stick whistled through the air again, but this time I caught it in mid-swing, wrenched it out of Gaspar’s hand, and tossed it out the narrow window behind him. I quickly folded my hands and looked at the table in front of me. “Begging your pardon, master,” I said, “but if you hit him again, I’ll kill you.”

Gaspar stood, but I was afraid to look at him (or Joshua, for that matter). “Ego,” said the monk. He left the room without another word.

Joshua and I sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking and rubbing our goose eggs. Well, it had been an interesting trip and all, but Joshua wasn’t very well going to learn much about being the Messiah from someone who hit him with a stick whenever it was mentioned, and that, I supposed, was the reason we were there. So, onward. I drank the bowl of tea in front of me, then the one that Gaspar had left. “Two wise men down, one to go,” I said. “We’d better find some breakfast if we’re going to travel.”

Joshua looked at me as perplexed as he had at Gaspar a few minutes before. “Do you think he needs that stick?”

Number Seven Monk handed us our satchels, bowed deeply, then went back into the monastery and closed the door, leaving Joshua and me standing there by the gong. It was a clear morning and we could see the smoke of cook fires rising from the village below.

“We should have asked for some breakfast,” I said. “This is going to be a long climb down.”

“I’m not leaving,” Josh said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I have a lot more to learn here.”

“Like how to take a beating?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not sure Gaspar will let me back in. He didn’t seem too pleased with me.”

“You threatened to kill him.”

“I did not, I
warned
that I’d kill him. Big difference.”

“So you’re not going to stay?”

And there it was, the question. Was I going to stay with my best friend, eat cold rice, sleep on a cold floor, take abuse from a mad monk,
and very likely have my skull split open, or was I going to go? Go where? Home? Back to Kabul and Joy? Despite the long journey, it seemed easier to go back the way I had come. At least some level of familiarity would be waiting there. But if I was making easy choices, why was I there in the first place?

“Are you sure you have to stay here, Josh? Can’t we go find Melchior?”

“I know I have things to learn here.” Joshua picked up the drumstick and rang the gong. In a few minutes the little port opened in the door and a monk we had never seen before stuck his face in the opening. “Go away. Your nature is dense and your breath smells like a yak’s ass.” He slammed the hatch.

Joshua rang the gong again.

“I don’t like that whole thing about killing the Messiah. I can’t stay here, Joshua. Not if he’s going to hit you.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to get hit quite a few more times until I learn what he needs me to know.”

“I have to go.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But I could stay.”

“No. Trust me, you have to leave me now, so you won’t later. I’ll see you again.” He turned away from me and faced the door.

“Oh, you don’t know anything else, but you know that all of a sudden?”

“Yes. Go, Biff. Good-bye.”

I walked down the narrow path and nearly stumbled over a precipice when I heard the hatch in the door open. “Where are you going?” shouted the monk.

“Home,” I said.

“Good, go frighten some children with your glorious ignorance.”

“I will.” I tried to keep my shoulders steady as I walked away, but it felt like someone was ripping my soul through the muscles of my back. I would not turn around, I vowed, and slowly, painfully, I made my way down the path, convinced that I would never see Joshua again.

Two days after I had walked away, I rang the gong outside the monastery and the little hatch opened to reveal the face of a newly shaven monk, the skin of his bald scalp still a dozen shades lighter in color than that of his face. “What?” he said.

“The villagers ate our camels,” I said.

“Go away. Your nostrils flare in an unpleasant manner and your soul is somewhat lumpy.”

“Joshua, let me in. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“I can’t just let you in,” Josh whispered. “You have to wait three days like everyone else.” Then loudly, and obviously for someone inside’s benefit, he said, “You appear to be infested by Bedouins! Now go away!” And he slammed the hatch.

I stood there. And waited. In a few minutes he opened the hatch.

“Infested by Bedouins?” I said.

“Give me a break. I’m new. Did you bring food and water to last you?”

“Yes, the toothless woman sold me some dried camel meat. There was a special.”

“That’s got to be unclean,” said Josh.

“Bacon, Joshua, remember?”

“Oh yeah. Sorry. I’ll try to sneak some tea and a blanket out to you, but it won’t be right away.”

“Then Gaspar will let me back in?”

“He was perplexed why you left in the first place. He said if anyone needed to learn some discipline, well, you know. There’ll be punishment, I think.”

“Sorry I left you.”

“You didn’t.” He grinned, looking sillier than normal with his two-toned head. “I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned here already.”

“What’s that?”

“When I’m in charge, if someone knocks, they will be able to come in. Making someone who is seeking comfort stand out in the cold is a crock of rancid yak butter.”

“Amen,” I said.

Josh slammed the little hatch, obviously the prescribed way of closing it. I stood and wondered how Joshua, when he finally learned how to be the Messiah, would work the phrase “crock of rancid yak butter” into a sermon. Just what we Jews needed, I thought, more dietary restrictions.

The monks stripped me naked and poured cold water over my head, then brushed me vigorously with brushes made from boar’s hair, then poured hot water on me, then scrubbed, then cold water, until I screamed for them to stop. At that point they shaved my head, taking generous nicks out of my scalp as they did so, rinsed away the hair that stuck to my body, and handed me a fresh orange robe, a blanket, and a wooden rice bowl. Later I was given a pair of slippers, woven from some sort of grass, and I made myself some socks from woven yak hair, but this was the measure of my wealth for six years: a robe, a blanket, a bowl, some slippers, and some socks.

As Monk Number Eight led me to meet with Gaspar, I thought of my old friend Bartholomew, and how much he would have loved the idea of my newfound austerity. He often told of how his Cynic patriarch Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, “I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist.”

Yeah, well, that’s all well and good for Diogenes, but when it was all I had, if anyone had tried to take my bowl they would have lost the vessel at the end of their wrist.

Gaspar sat on the floor in the same small room, eyes closed, hands folded on his knees before him. Joshua sat facing him in the same position. Number Eight Monk bowed out of the room and Gaspar opened his eyes.

“Sit.”

I did.

“These are the four rules for which you may be expelled from the monastery: one, a monk will have no sexual intercourse with anyone, even down to an animal.”

Joshua looked at me and cringed, as if he expected me to say something that would anger Gaspar. I said, “Right, no intercourse.”

“Two: a monk, whether in the monastery or in the village, shall take no thing that is not given. Three: if a monk should intentionally take the life of a human or one like a human, either by his hand or by weapon, he will be expelled.”

“One like a human?” I asked.

“You shall see,” said Gaspar. “Four, a monk who claims to have reached superhuman states, or claims to have attained the wisdom of the saints, having not done so, will be expelled. Do you understand these four rules?”

“Yes,” I said. Joshua nodded.

“Understand that there are no mitigating circumstances. If you commit any of these offenses as judged by the other monks, you must leave the monastery.”

Again I said yes and then Gaspar went into the thirteen rules for which a monk could be suspended from the monastery for a fortnight (the first of these was the heartbreaker, “no emission of semen except in a dream”) and then the ninety offenses for which one would receive an unfavorable rebirth if the sins were not repented (these ranged from destroying any kind of vegetation or deliberately depriving an animal of life to sitting in the open with a woman or claiming to a layman to have superhuman powers, even if you had them). Overall, there was an extraordinary number of rules, over a hundred on decorum, dozens for settling disputes, but remember, we were Jews, raised under the influence of the Pharisees, who judged virtually every event of day-to-day life against the Law of Moses. And with Balthasar we had studied Confucius, whose
philosophy was little more than an extensive system of etiquette. I had no doubt Joshua could do this, and there was a chance I could handle it too, if Gaspar didn’t use that bamboo rod too liberally and if I could conjure enough wet dreams. (Hey, I was eighteen years old and had just lived five years in a fortress full of available concubines, I had a habit, okay?)

“Monk Number Twenty-two,” Gaspar said to Joshua, “you shall begin by learning how to sit.”

“I can sit,” I said.

“And you, Number Twenty-one, will shave the yak.”

“That’s just an expression, right?”

It wasn’t.

A yak is an extremely large, extremely hairy, buffalolike animal with dangerous-looking black horns. If you’ve ever seen a water buffalo, imagine it wearing a full-body wig that drags the ground. Now sprinkle it with musk, manure, and sour milk: you’ve got yourself a yak. In a cavelike stable, the monks kept one female yak, which they let out during the day to wander the mountain paths to graze. On what, I don’t know. There didn’t seem to be enough living plant life to support an animal of that size (the yak’s shoulder was higher than my head), but there didn’t seem to be enough plant life in all of Judea for a herd of goats, either, and herding was one of the main occupations. What did I know?

The yak provided just enough milk and cheese to remind the monks that they didn’t get enough milk and cheese from one yak for twenty-two monks. The animal also provided a long, coarse wool which needed to be harvested twice a year. This venerated duty, along with combing the crap and grass and burrs out of the wool, fell to me. There’s not much to know about yaks beyond that, except for one important fact that Gaspar felt I needed to learn through practice: yaks hate to be shaved.

It fell to Monks Eight and Seven to bandage me, set my broken legs and arm, and clean off the yak dung that had been so thoroughly stomped into my body. I would tell you the distinction of those two solemn students if I could think of any, but I can’t. The goal of all of the monks was to let go of the ego, the self, and but for a few more lines on the faces of the
older men, they looked alike, dressed alike, and behaved alike. I, on the other hand, was quite distinct from the others, despite my shaved head and saffron robe, as I had bandages over half of my body and three out of four limbs splinted with bamboo.

After the yak disaster, Joshua waited until the middle of the night to crawl down the hall to my cell. The soft snores of monks filled the halls, and the soft turbulence of the bats that entered their cave through the monastery echoed off the stone walls like the death panting of epileptic shadows.

“Does it hurt?” Joshua said.

Sweat streamed from my face despite the chilly temperature. “I can hardly breathe.” Seven and Eight had wrapped my broken ribs, but every breath was a knife in the side.

Joshua put his hand on my forehead.

“I’ll be all right, Josh, you don’t have to do that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he said. “Keep your voice down.”

In seconds my pain was gone and I could breathe again. Then I fell asleep or passed out from gratitude, I don’t know which. When I awoke with the dawn Joshua was still kneeling beside me, his hand still pressed against my forehead. He had fallen asleep there.

I carried the combed yak wool to Gaspar, who was chanting in the great cavern temple. It amounted to a fairly large bundle and I set it on the floor behind the monk and backed away.

“Wait,” Gaspar said, holding a single finger in the air. He finished his chant, then turned to me. “Tea,” he said. He led and I followed to the room where he had received Joshua and me when we had first arrived. “Sit,” he said. “Sit, don’t wait.”

I sat and watched him make a charcoal fire in a small stone brazier, using a bow and fire drill to start the flames first in some dried moss, then blowing it onto the charcoal.

“I invented a stick that makes fire instantly,” I said. “I could teach—”

Gaspar glared at me and held up the finger again to poke my words out of the air. “Sit,” he said. “Don’t talk. Don’t wait.”

He heated water in a copper pot until it boiled, then poured it over some
tea leaves in an earthenware bowl. He set two small cups on the table, then proceeded to pour tea from the bowl.

“Hey, doofus!” I yelled. “You’re spilling the fucking tea!”

Gaspar smiled and set the bowl down on the table.

“How can I give you tea if your cup is already full?”

“Huh?” I said eloquently. Parables were never my strong suit. If you want to say something, say it. So, of course, Joshua and Buddhists were the perfect people to hang out with, straight talkers that they were.

Gaspar poured himself some tea, then took a deep breath and closed his eyes. After perhaps a whole minute passed, he opened them again. “If you already know everything, then how will I be able to teach you? You must empty your cup before I can give you tea.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” I grabbed my cup, tossed the tea out the same window I’d tossed Gaspar’s stick, then plopped the cup back on the table. “I’m ready,” I said.

“Go to the temple and sit,” Gaspar said.

No tea? He was obviously still not happy about my almost-threat on his life. I backed out of the door bowing (a courtesy Joy had taught me).

“One more thing,” Gaspar said. I stopped and waited. “Number Seven said that you would not live through the night. Number Eight agreed. How is it that you are not only alive, but unhurt?”

I thought about it for a second before I answered, something I seldom do, then I said, “Perhaps those monks value their own opinions too highly. I can only hope that they have not corrupted anyone else’s thinking.”

“Go sit,” Gaspar said.

Sitting was what we did. To learn to sit, to be still and hear the music of the universe, was why we had come halfway around the world, evidently. To let go of ego, not individuality, but that which distinguishes us from all other beings. “When you sit, sit. When you breathe, breathe. When you eat, eat,” Gaspar would say, meaning that every bit of our being was to be in the moment, completely aware of the now, no past, no future, nothing dividing us from everything that is.

It’s hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?

“See your skin as what connects you to the universe, not what separates you from it,” Gaspar told me, trying to teach me the essence of what enlightenment meant, while admitting that it was not something that could be taught. Method he could teach. Gaspar could sit.

The legend went (I pieced it together from bits dropped by the master and his monks) that Gaspar had built the monastery as a place to sit. Many years ago he had come to China from India, where he had been born a prince, to teach the emperor and his court the true meaning of Buddhism, which had been lost in years of dogma and overinterpretation of scripture.