Surfacing

by Kathleen Jamie

  An elderly lama, wearing a heavy cloak and holding his yellow hat at his chest like a fan, paced up and down between the rows of seated monks, rather in the manner of an old-fashioned schoolmaster. He seemed to be leading the chant, pacing then turning, so the folds of his cloak swayed at the floor.

  Sean and I were not alone at the door. A few more laypeople had arrived. A couple in Tibetan clothes prostrated themselves in reverence, then watched the ceremony, still lying down. A little boy of six or so, in a blue tracksuit. To my surprise, a young soldier in green uniform took a place. From the corner of my eye I saw the star at his shoulder begin to sway back and forth in time. I focused on the grain of the wood on the foot-worn doorstep.

  The monks’ rhythmic chant continued, then the tenor of the sound changed, the grain of the wood swam back to my awareness and I realised I’d been transported. How long had passed I didn’t know, but some monks had begun leaving the hall, brushing past their motley audience to return a few moments later with pitchers full of a drink, milk maybe. Each monk produced a bowl from somewhere in his robes, which was filled. They all drank. And then it was over. The lamas emerged into the evening sunshine, pulled on their boots and were away.

  There were moments of connection, too. One evening I was walking by the monastery when a boy monk called to me, a novice of ten or twelve, with a sweet manner. He was sitting on some steps poring over a slate of schoolwork. What luck! On his slate was the English alphabet, and lo, here was a native speaker strolling by. He beckoned me over. He was doing well, could recite the letters, but he was defeated by ‘W.’ He pointed to the ‘W’ on his slate, and made a helpless gesture. I sat beside him, and a small group of shaven-headed boys in robes gathered to watch and laugh as I drew the letter carefully in my own notebook, then passed the pen. ‘Dubble-you,’ I intoned. ‘Dub-elle-you,’ the lad replied. We went on with a short cheerful lesson. I saw him and his class-mates several times after that. ‘Dub-elle-you!’ they’d call, waving across the street.

  * * *

  * * *

  We spent our days wandering, looking, taking photographs in Sean’s case. In the dusty town, in the surrounding hills, sometimes together, sometimes not.

  The sky had a sense of altitude about it, there was a feel in the air. For all the seeming exoticism and meditative calm, there were obviously tensions and flashpoints. Rumour must have been rife, as this was a Tibetan town and Tibet proper was under martial law. Strikes and protests inflamed cities to the east.

  But our small orbit was the street and back alleys, the Muslim quarter with its pagoda, the Labrang Monastery, the surrounding hills. Sometimes we saw the Czechs and joined up with them. We saw the art students too, who were always together, and we’d wave.

  I liked to see the horses hitched to telegraph poles in town, waiting with hooves cocked as their owners played Space Invaders or ate ice cream. I admired the women from the back as they examined goods in a shop, in their long skirts, their hair arranged into 111 tiny plaits and finished with a horizontal band of turquoise stones. I could look and smile, but what did I learn of their lives, the prostrating Tibetan pilgrims, the stallholder deftly working an abacus, the ice-cream girl with her barrow, who sat with her chin in her hands when business was slack? Nothing at all.

  There were plenty of dogs in town, and long-haired pigs that rooted in muddy alleyways, and one day in a wayside yard uphill from the main drag I encountered half a dozen yaks, black, horned, saddled with bamboo rings through their noses, and beside them sacks filled with cakes of their own dried dung. Often I wished I could draw, like the art students. I’d have drawn those yaks chewing the cud, their animal patience.

  It became Elena’s habit to call out down the echoey corridor with a sort of ululation, especially if she had news, gathered from her own sources. Her days were a mystery to us, but she was almost always in her room of an evening, with the little terrier. If we heard that whoop, we went. The strikes were spreading, the whole country. Something would give. The Czechs were jubilant.

  * * *

  * * *

  One day, in the hotel, the art students asked a question that bothered me. We didn’t socialise with the students, not on the street. Or, rather, they kept a distance. As with the monks, we had to be circumspect. They had to be careful. But there must have been a mutual curiosity. I was alone and the question was asked in the hotel corridor and delivered, for once, by the girl, in careful and polite English with Chinese accents. She said, ‘Please, are you worker, or student?’

  I couldn’t answer. Were they the only options? The gravel-sievers, the hotel girl, the striking traindrivers in Xining, in Chengdu – they were workers. The novice lad with his ‘W,’ the young people standing in front of me, and those we’d heard were encamped in protest in the public square in Beijing. They were students.

  But what were we? No wonder the hotel girl seemed sullen, putting up with unkempt foreigners who stood so much taller than she, who kept turning up, who had no language, who demanded rooms. What were they? Or the monks, seen as often in teahouses as in the monastery precincts – what were they?

  The students all had flawless pale complexions, interested shy eyes.

  ‘Worker or student?’ I asked Sean later.

  He was laid on his bed, in jeans and T-shirt, left arm over his eyes, playing Burning Spear through the tinny speakers. ‘Tell ’em we are as lilies of the field,’ he said.

  I did once encounter some monks engaged in hard physical work. They were beside a path which wound up from the monastery out onto the grassy hills. First I heard a pounding, and turning a corner saw a dozen monks with arms raised, hurling heavy stones down between their feet. They were packing down the earth ready to make a new building. Others were working with spades and mattocks. They were all shaven-headed and, though labouring, wore heavy monastic robes, in shades from plum through crimson. It was the shape of their bare arms which made me realise they were not monks at all, but nuns, young women building – what? A convent?

  Two male gaffers were directing operations, and a handsome older sister scolded the girls for halting in their labours to smile at me. I think they were all glad for the diversion. It was sunny, and shadows fell on their robes; their boots and hems were muddy. At that moment, a low door in an ochre-red wall opened and another nun emerged, stooping, carrying a tray of ash to dispose of, with three puppies gambolling at her feet.

  There was another building site, too. One day, we came upon a part of the monastic enclave we had not discovered before, a courtyard outside a large assembly hall. Something was going on. Two white, official-looking vehicles were parked there and a small truck, and workmen moved among mounds of earth, mortar, wood and wood shavings. The hall doors were wide open, and within we saw not candlelit statues, but brash electric arc-lights shining on a ladder or scaffold. Was there drilling, banging? That was the only time someone flapped at us, to make us go away. Monk or lay workman, I can’t recall.

  ‘Those posters slapped on the monastery walls, do you know what they say?’ I asked Elena later. It was becoming a habit, to ask Elena later.

  She shifted her gum.

  ‘Huh. That the monastery has been taken over by the State for its protection. You know there was a fire?’

  An electrical fire, perhaps not accidental. An excuse for the State to move in and make a show of repairing and caring.

  * * *

  * * *

  On two or three occasions in town, during those days, we heard words dropped quietly at our ears. It might be in a busy teahouse or on a back lane, wherever people thought they couldn’t be overheard. They were voices of tense young men who had a few words of English. ‘Please, you know what’s happening?’ Or: ‘Speak English? Have you BBC?’ But, no we had no radio, no short wave; we knew less than they did about the strikes, or protests in Lhasa, or the student demonstrations in Beijing, eight hundred miles away. With a discr
eet word or a shake of the head, we had to disappoint these earnest people, who slipped away.

  As for the other Westerners, we waved to each other in the street, met for a bowl of noodles. Sean often carried a camera, and cajoled people into posing for him. We never saw Elena, though. Where she went by day or whom she saw, we didn’t know, though she said she knew people in town. In Lhasa, before she was thrown out, she’d got by with a little language teaching. Maybe she’d picked up a few students here, on the quiet. We never saw her eat. Did it occur to us she might be penniless?

  One morning it rained hard. It often rained; the valley was prone to short-lived thunderstorms. We stayed indoors watching rain pock the gravel yard and fill its potholes. I was copying passages from a booklet I’d borrowed from Elena, a selection of karmas and sutras by the first Dalai Lama, recently translated into English. There were instructions on developing the Bodhi mind:

  Visualise the sentient beings who have sufferings. Determine to free them from it. Think – May they be freed from suffering.

  Meditate on the beautiful mind of love. Visualise the sentient beings who are without happiness. Determine to place them in joy. Think – May they be happy.

  When the rain eased, we went to Elena’s room and said, ‘We’re going for some noodles, will you come? Let us buy you lunch.’ but she just smiled as though the thought of noodles amused her. ‘Or let’s go down to the monastery. There’s a teahouse...’

  ‘Ah, you like teahouses!’

  ‘...beside the chorten. They do wonderful sweet tea with those round seeds in and you can watch the people spinning the prayer wheels.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Elena. ‘Perhaps I will meet you there later. First I will make a visit, my friends will give me food. I have friends in this town.’

  She rose and stood looking out of the window, in her black jacket. ‘The girlfriend I am visiting, she has just come from prison. Making leaflets, you know?’

  Then, as if it were an equivalent: ‘After the rain, big yellow flowers are coming. This the people like.’

  * * *

  * * *

  We did try to ask the young students about their lives and their art. They were shy, always smiling. Perhaps they were chary about being with us; trouble would follow if they were seen consorting with Westerners. Perhaps we intimidated them. The men especially were so much bigger, physically; Sean was tall and blond, Marak burly. But one day we all chanced to meet in the grimy hotel corridor, and we formed a huddle.

  We tried to ask them about the student protests we were hearing of, on the streets of faraway Beijing. But these students were far from strident. The boy with the red bandana round his long hair spoke for them all, with Elena translating as best she could.

  ‘He says, “We are not revolutionaries. Some reforms would be adequate.”’ The lad paused, then spoke again.

  ‘He says, “Life is like breathing and breathing and never being able to exhale.”

  ‘He says, “We are looking for beauty, with our art. We are looking for flowers.”

  ‘He says, “We challenge the government with beauty. Not fighting. Not politics.”’

  ‘Do you understand?’ Elena turned, looking directly at Marek.

  Marek snorted.

  The same boy showed us his sketchbook. Street scenes in red ink, a few broad lines, and look: a woman in a chuba, pulling a donkey on a rope, the donkey pulling a cart laden with brushwood. A nomad herdsman, with saddlebags slung over his shoulder. Here a poor stunted blossoming lilac tree I recognised, having passed it many times. Chinese students, on a sketching trip to the Tibetan town. Maybe they were exoticising the Tibetans, but weren’t we all?

  As I recall, Elena only once accepted an invitation to eat. She and I went to a noodle house that smelled of woodsmoke and was the domain of a stooped arthritic old lady dressed all in black – black jacket, black tight trousers, down to her tiny black socks and slippers – who moved by holding onto the rickety furniture. Although it was June, her teahouse always had a wintery fug; there was woodsmoke and cigarette smoke, and shafts of light falling through cracks in the walls, where steam swirled from pans and kettles. A hefty bowl of noodles cost pennies. We sat on benches alongside slurping workmen, a jar of communal chopsticks on the table.

  ‘What will you do if they don’t open it again? Lhasa, I mean.’

  ‘I will wait. I have friends in this town.’

  ‘Could you teach here?’

  ‘No. I have some translation, for a very small publisher. English into Italian. You?’

  ‘Take the slow train home to Europe, I suppose.’

  It wasn’t something I wanted to think about. The future. Worker or student? I had done with student. Worker held no appeal.

  We ate, paid the old lady’s more able assistant, ambled up the street together passing stalls selling knives and tobacco, a street dentist, a blind musician.

  Bicycles jangled by. Near the bus-station yard, we met Sean and Marek and Zenek. They were obvious figures on the jostling pavement, big, tousled, blondish men.

  Alois was up on the hills with his butterfly net.

  Sean was laughing. ‘We’re all going to the barber’s. Zenek says we’ve got to come and watch him having his head shaved.’

  Zenek grinned at the mention of his name.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Moral support?’

  ‘No. I mean, why’s he having his head shaved?’

  ‘He wants to look like a Buddhist monk.’

  Zenek rubbed his head with his hand, a rosary wound round his wrist. ‘Buddhist good!’ he said.

  * * *

  * * *

  One day we climbed out of town by a worn path that followed a stream, a tributary of the unloved river that flowed through town. It was hard going, the town was at nine thousand feet – enough to begin to feel it. At length the flutter of the builders’ tractors gave out and the path wound on past wayside cairns, climbed onto a green plateau, where the hills seemed to billow away forever. There were ruins up there, mud-walled monastic retreats the Chinese army had reputedly destroyed. The hills were in their summer blooming; soon the town seemed far away. Up on the hill bees droned, and larks rose twittering into blue silence. And there were butterflies! Black butterflies I immediately felt anxious for. Alois would be up here somewhere, pouncing with his net.

  On high points of farther hills, prayer flags hung. In the distant flanks of the low hills roved herds of sheep and cattle. We met two women, just sitting on the grass, one older and wrinkly-eyed, one young. From among their layers of clothing, and with big smiles, they produced some dry and sandy bread, which they broke and offered us. We all sat, exchanging nods of misunderstanding and laughter. The bread was rock-hard and tasted of nothing, the women smelled of woodsmoke and animals. They had a pet calf with little flags in its ears, which nuzzled into their hands. Then they sang, a pure soulful sound which carried far in the clear air.

  That night Elena called us, with her customary ululation, and we found her sitting cross-legged on her bed, wearing her black little jacket and trousers, cradling the dog, her papers scattered around her. She told us what she’d heard: that the strike had now spread to the whole country. That Beijing was completely closed. No foreigners could leave; only embassy staff, because they were being expelled.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So they will not see!’

  ‘See what, Elena?’

  ‘Bombing the universities.’

  Don’t be ridiculous, I thought, but said nothing.

  She went on, ‘These art students, they are making friends with the Tibetan people. With the student demonstrations in Beijing, the Tibetans are kind to them. They are very nice students. They like the Tibetans.’

  Then, with a little shrug, she said that she was being followed, but she seemed neither surprised nor outraged.


  * * *

  * * *

  A travelling opera troupe arrived to stay in the hotel and, for one night only, transformed the place. The concrete, echoey acoustics suited their voices; a stringed instrument sounded from the basement, a woman sang a few notes outside our door, answered by a tenor elsewhere. Why speak when you can sing? All day they sang phrases to each other, and snatches of song. Even the cute little number one tune got the operatic treatment. Then they were gone, and it was back to the clanking buckets and spitting.

  One evening, very soon after that, Sean and I were returning from the monastery. We’d been within the precinct and Sean had taken some photographs of a lone monk concentrating as he made a ritual design on the ground with a substance that may have been sand or flour. The monk had glanced up, Sean had made his ‘May I?’ and ‘Do you mind?’ gestures, and the monk looked down again to his task, non-committal.

  Making our way back to the hotel we’d happened upon a bunch of kids playing football and joined in for a while, to everyone’s mirth, and then it was dusk. We were in a residential warren, a lane with high walls where gates of family houses opened onto a lane. Suddenly a gate opened and a middle-aged man looked out. He checked the lane was empty, then he beckoned. Had he seen us coming? He was plainly dressed, in a Western-style shirt and trousers, there was no threat in his manner, only urgency – there was something he wanted us to see. Was he Tibetan, Chinese, Buddhist, Muslim, a worker, a scholar? We couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter.