Surfacing

by Kathleen Jamie

  It was one of the tributaries of the Yellow River, and maybe in spring it ran with snow melt because hills surrounded the town and we were quite high, nine thousand feet or so. But it was very early June, the snow had retreated and the hills were green. Above the town grazed herds of sheep and yaks. We could see from the window mist lifting in the mornings and, on the nearest summit, a cairn with a bundle of prayer flags straining in the wind.

  Prayer flags. I remember thinking we’d come a long way to see that: some tatters of cotton tied to a pole.

  * * *

  * * *

  We’d arrived in Xiahe by bus, around three weeks after leaving London. I’d spent my mid-May birthday in Rawalpindi; from there we’d taken a mighty Bedford bus up the Karakoram Highway to Gilgit, where we spent a few days before making another arduous bus journey through Hunza and up over the Khunjerab Pass. These names are wonder-filled and exotic to me now, elevated with a sense of altitude, of jagged snow-plastered mountains, blue skies and strikingly cold air.

  I recall a high valley with a river running through it, austere and beautiful, and villages like glowing gems spilling down barren mountainsides. I recall sitting on a cold riverside stone, nursing a headache as we waited for clearance at the border post, at fourteen thousand feet, before the long descent toward Kashgar. There the people were mostly Uighur. In public many women wore full-face brownish veils. There were jugglers and acrobats outside the mosque, and yoghurt was sold on the street in shallow dishes. The yoghurt was cool and thick.

  In Kashgar, we learned from some Americans that Tibet was resolutely closed. There were protests and clampdowns, not only in Tibet but in Chinese cities too, strikes and unrest. The Chinese authorities were expelling from Lhasa any foreigners already there, and forbidding others to enter.

  We faced a dilemma. Should we return to Pakistan and wait there, maybe in Hunza or Gilgit town, hoping for the situation to ease? Or press on, and see what happened. We pressed on, crossing the Taklamakan Desert, a three-day journey over grey bleak gravel. From the bus windows we saw abandoned dwellings and sacks and sacks of dark sand, gathered by god knows whom, awaiting collection that never came. At every desolate oasis town, we heard the same news: ‘Tibet closed,’ ‘No foreigners allowed.’ In the town of Golmud, we joined the milling throng at the bus station, a press of bodies. There was a sign on the wall in English: ‘Travel to Autonomous Region is forbid to foreigners. Martial law is executing in Lhasa.’

  Executing in Lhasa. We tried nonetheless, mouthing our request through a little wooden hatch. The ticket-seller slammed the hatch shut.

  Also on the walls were messages scratched like hobo marks, some in English: ‘For Lhasa, try southern truck stop, not here.’ ‘Sam – we are heading east. J & T.’ At the southern truck stop, no driver would give Westerners a lift, and fair enough. We trailed away, not wanting anyone to get into trouble on our behalf. As we left the truck stop a Tibetan monk in maroon robes sitting on an upturned box offered us a wan smile.

  And now we were in Xiahe, a place Sean had suggested because the town was ethnically and culturally Tibetan. It had grown around of one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, the ancient Labrang Monastery. But the town lay in eastern Amdo province, which was deemed to fall outwith the designated ‘Autonomous Region’ of Tibet. Though Tibetan, Xiahe was, in effect, in China.

  Another bone-shaking bus left Lanzhou and wound uphill for several hours into air cool and clear after the heat and city dirt. When we descended from the bus, it was into yet another yard of gravel and puddles surrounded by shacks. But this time, even before I’d shouldered my rucksack, a grey-haired old woman approached me. She was wrapped in a thick sheepskin chuba, with beads at her ears and throat, a flash of gold in her teeth. She took my hand in both of hers, nodding and smiling and speaking to me with sentiments I could only guess at, as I nodded and smiled in return.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was glad our room was at the back. From the front there rose a constant ballyhoo of construction works and bicycle bells. Even inside, it was noisy, with a daily clanking of buckets and gruff shouts, and there always seemed to be someone hawking up phlegm with a sound like cloth being sheared. Every day brought the swish of the hotel girl’s broom as she swept up cigarette butts and the husks of sunflower seeds. Sometimes another young woman came to visit her, bringing a baby, and the two of them played with the baby, in its little red knitted trousers. But mostly she worked alone.

  And there was the police station, directly opposite, secure behind its walls and metal gates. On its gateposts, posters showed grainy images of hapless men. I presumed they were ‘Wanted’ posters. Without language, spoken or written, we were as babies ourselves.

  There was noise but also song. Each day workmen came to the hotel yard to sieve heaps of gravel and load the fine stones onto a handcart. It looked a desolate job but sometimes they sang shanties. There was also a Chinese song, maybe it was traditional, maybe it was the current number one, because we often heard it wafting out of windows from radios or whistled on the street. It was just a simple melody, a woman singing in a high girlish voice. I grew to like it, in a wistful way. We had our own Western music, too. Sean had brought a dozen cassette tapes and a Sony Walkman, so we could have reggae or The Doors, again; ‘The End’ played as though on a loop.

  There were other guests in the hotel. One was a tall monk who wore brown robes and tied his hair in a topknot. He may have been a Taoist, he may have been Japanese, I don’t know, and I regret that I didn’t try to speak with him. From our window we could watch him make his way to the boiler house every morning, almost gliding in his long robes. Every time, he would pause to bow to the labourers, who’d halt their work for a moment, nonplussed. If you encountered him, he bowed from the waist. He was gone again after a few days, on his perambulations. Another guest was a young woman also about our own age, whom we’d remarked on. She had thick black hair and dark eyes and she wore heavy dark woollen clothes. She kept a puppy, which she somehow managed to smuggle into and out of her room, the last room on our floor, at the front.

  After a couple of days we coincided in the corridor, the terrier squirming in her arms. She greeted me in Italian-accented English.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought you were Tibetan!’

  I must have said the right thing, because she was obviously pleased and exclaimed ‘Why?’ as though it hadn’t been deliberate. As usual, she was wearing local clothes, a little cross-over jacket with brocade around the hem, black cuffed trousers. A turquoise ring. Her black hair drawn back into a bun or plait. She smelled of woodsmoke, incense. She chewed gum.

  ‘No, I am from Milan.’

  ‘But you speak Chinese. The only time that poor hotel girl smiles is when you speak to her. Doesn’t she mind about the dog?’ I asked.

  ‘No, she is nice, really. It is difficult for her.’

  ‘And you speak Italian, of course,’ I went on.

  ‘And English and Tibetan!’

  ‘You speak Tibetan?’

  ‘I have spent two years there, in Lhasa. You have seen Lhasa?’

  ‘No ... we were trying to get there, but...’

  ‘Ah, the sky! This Lhasa sky is like nowhere else in the world. But I was thrown out, pah! But I am still here. Amdo is Tibet, whatever this Chinese government says. Lhasa! It’s true they are destroying and destroying, but...’

  ‘But..?’

  ‘Only when we have been heartbroken can we be truly happy.’

  That was the first we knew of Elena.

  Sean had arrived by then, lugging his tripod. Here was someone he could talk to about Lhasa’s blue skies, the wanton destruction, places he’d visited and longed to see again. The Potala Palace, monasteries, tearooms they both knew.

  Later Elena invited us into her room. It was plain, of course, one windowpane was broken and had been mended with bro
wn paper, but she had made an effort with it, as if she intended to stay, by fixing her own drawings to the walls, and a little printed mandala or Tibetan calendar, and by burning incense. The musky scent lingered in the room as it did on her person. She had a few books and a teapot – and the dog, of course. Aside from the puppy, her only indulgence seemed to be chewing gum.

  She said, ‘And now we have this demonstration in Beijing!’

  The cities were closing down, strikebound. This is what we were hearing. There were strikes and protests in the cities we had so recently passed through, but we had seen nothing of them. Students were demonstrating, especially in Beijing, and, of course, the Tibetans were in open revolt, hence the military law ‘executing in Lhasa.’

  The next day another room became occupied, one on Elena’s side of the corridor between ours and hers. Three Czech men arrived. Together they were so bulky they barely fitted into the spartan space they shared, but most of the bulk was Marek’s. He was the ebullient one, a mountaineer like Sean and a self-styled businessman. He was a sort of tour leader or guide to the others, because he spoke a bit of English and seemed ballsy. He wore denim jeans and a loose leather jacket.

  ‘We speak English, too,’ we told Marek. ‘Not much use round here. We’ve no idea what’s going on.’

  Of the other two, Zenek was a photographer, again like Sean. He was fine-boned, more sensitive and observant, communicating to us and Elena with gestures, smiles, long looks. Sean and he shared the international language of cameras and lenses.

  ‘Me expeditions, he exhibitions!’ said Marek.

  The third man was called Alois. He was older, maybe fifty. He wore baggy cargo trousers and shirt and a sort of fisherman’s waistcoat with many pockets, because, incredibly, he was a butterfly collector.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Yes, he will collect butterflies!’

  ‘You mean, with a net? In a Buddhist town?’

  The Czechs confirmed the rumours we had been hearing. The cities they had passed through to reach Xiahe were indeed now strikebound, with train and bus networks at a standstill.

  ‘Xining is closed!’ cried Marek. ‘Lanzhou! Chengdu! The government will fall!’

  Sweetly, and quietly, three other guests had also arrived and been shown to a room in the basement. The Taoist monk had wandered on his way, and in his stead had arrived three Chinese art students – very young, two boys and a pretty girl who wove her hair in two sticking-out plaits like a doll. The boys wore denim and had grown their own hair long, in peaceable defiance, like Western students of the 1960s. The taller of the two wore a bandana round his head. They smiled often, and carried ink and sketchbooks when they went around town.

  The Czech men were on holiday.

  ‘Holidays in China?’

  ‘It is because we are from Czechoslovakia. We may go nowhere, only China and Russia. And we HATE Russia!’

  * * *

  * * *

  From the hotel we made forays out into the town. Between the eastern end, with the hotel, police station and Chinese businesses, and the western end, where lay the monastery and Tibetan quarter, there ran three-quarters of a mile of open-fronted shops and stalls. Bicycles rattled by, Flying Pigeon brand. Jeeps and small tractors. The shops and services were all up a few wooden steps. There were dark and fragrant kiosks of tea and spice, apricots, walnuts, knives and hardware. There must have been a cinema somewhere; it was advertised by a board with pictures of pretty film stars. The road followed the river, though the river was treated as little more than a sewer behind the hastily thrown-up buildings.

  We walked up this main street almost every day; there was always something new to see. A Muslim shopkeeper wearing a white skullcap, totting up on an abacus, a leopardskin hanging from a peg, for sale. A book-binder’s, with rolls of paper huge as tree trunks.

  We often went to the monastery, which was called Labrang. Its enclave filled the lower end of a side valley, like a walled village in itself, far enough from the town to be peaceful. The main buildings were whitewashed, with green tiled roofs with flying eaves. The monastery must have been the reason this town sprung up in the first place, as it was hundreds of years old. Its monks were of the Gelugpa order, the order to which the Dalai Lama belongs. Shaven-headed, they wore the mulberry-coloured robes and yellow hats that His Holiness has made familiar in the West. We’d often see these robed men and boys walking through the town or sitting in teahouses. On the first day I saw a dozen of them in a trailer drawn by a tractor, laughing, robes flapping, careering off out of town to heaven knows where. Maybe up into the hills. Beyond the monastery the road led to the high grasslands; we had the impression it petered out somewhere upstream. Up on those slopes lived families of nomad herders encamped at the summer grazings.

  Very soon after we arrived, I think the first evening, we made our way to the monastery, walked clockwise around its precinct walls, then slipped in through an open gate. We found ourselves among high-walled lanes. The major buildings, the temples and colleges were three storeys tall, and blue cotton curtains above their windows rippled in the breeze. On their roofs, golden ornaments caught the late sun. I remember quietude, and a smell of woodsmoke or juniper-smoke.

  We entered the courtyard of a temple. There seemed to be no one around, though we could hear wood being chopped with an axe, a closed gate. Sparrows chirped. Beneath a porch with decorated architraves was a heavy double door painted with subtle tiger stripes. Each door had a brass-hooped handle choked with prayer scarves. The door lay very slightly ajar. We dared to cross the yard, mount the wooden steps which were dipped with age, and creak the door open a little more, just enough to look inside. We beheld a mysterious womb-like otherworld, a hall that smelled of age and butter-lamps. Carved painted pillars held up a smoke-darkened painted ceiling, candles softly illuminated the faces and folded limbs of many gilded statues in niches at the wall, and glinted brassware, on the figures on painted thangkas.

  Of course we wanted to explore the monastery, encounter the monks, take photographs, fall under the charm or influence of their services or rituals.

  We’d come a very long way, and I think ours was a beguiled but well-meaning curiosity. We realised we had to be circumspect, respectful – it was a monastery, after all. But we’d heard rumours that the monks were under careful scrutiny, even that the monasteries had been infiltrated by spies. It was said that a deal had been struck with the Chinese government: if the monks wanted their monasteries to survive, then they would have to allow them to be treated as theme parks, opening the ancient wooden doors to noisy tourist groups by day. If they made this concession, they would be allowed to function normally at other hours. There were fewer monks than there used to be; not all was as it seemed. Who told me this? Sean, after his experience in Lhasa the year before? Certainly Elena.

  Evening was the best time for the monastery, when red-tinted clouds drifted over the hills, and the roofs shone. If Sean and I went there – he shouldering his tripod – the monks neither welcomed us, nor sent us away. The lamas had a lot to put up with, but if we did meet one in the monastic precinct, he almost inevitably smiled and nodded to us, apparently not displeased to see Westerners, or so it seemed. But we were tourists too, wandering around, peeking in at the temples to see the thangkas – manifestations of psychological states deep and strange to our eyes.

  Skirting the monastery, winding along at the foot of a green hill, was a paved path used by local people and pilgrims to circumambulate the sacred buildings. The path ended with a row of shining white stupas, what the Tibetans call chortens. The stupas were weighty structures, shaped somewhat like huge upturned handbells on a plinth, maybe fifteen feet high, white and bright. They radiated thin ropes, like guy ropes holding down a tent. Each rope was tied with small bells that tinkled in the breeze. Stray dogs gathered there, yellow-flanked creatures that ate scraps brought to them by kindly old women.

&
nbsp; This area was where people gathered at the end of the summer day, strolling in a sort of Tibetan passeggiata. Passeggiata with added merit-building: after they’d laid their foreheads reverently on the base of the chorten, the people moved on to a long avenue of prayer wheels. They often came in family groups. Some were obviously hill-folk, by their attire: ancient chubas unfolded and rolled around the waist, striped aprons for the women. Their eyes were crinkled after years of sun and dung-smoke, a glint of gold showed when they smiled. Felt fedoras were popular, sometimes sunglasses. Pilgrims arrived in town, dusty from the road, striding with staffs and bundles.

  The prayer wheels were cylinders painted with scripture in red and gold – there must have been dozens of them, doubtless some auspicious number – and they turned on greased pivots with a particular squeak and clatter, the handles worn by countless hands. Everyone spun them after his or her own fashion. Lusty young herdsmen moved quickly down the line, turning each as he might spin a girl at a dance. Grey-haired elders nearing the end of their days moved slowly, often having to arrange their walking sticks in one hand before reaching with the other for the wheel, to build up a little more merit in this incarnation, hopeful for the next.

  One evening we heard a cymbal clashing. A lone monk was up on the temple roof among the ornaments, beating in rhythm. In response, lamas in heavy woollen cloaks and yellow hats laid over their shoulders emerged from cell doors around the courtyard and made their way to temple. We stood aside, trying not to be noticed. The monks began chanting as they gathered on the wide threshold, removing their boots. It was the temple with the subtle tiger-striped doors. When they were inside, we sat quietly at the threshold, and watched as the monks within the darkened interior sat cross-legged on cushions. A couple of latecomers threw themselves in, robes flapping, to take their place in the chant. Until this point, the chant was a low humming drone, but soon, like a beehive discovering speech, the sound began to take form, low and gravelly.