We stepped quickly through the wooden gate, crossed a tiny yard into a room under a low roof, where a woman, doubtless his wife, was standing back with her hands clasped at her chest. There was time only for a glance around: red and yellow quilts folded on top of a chest, two chairs, a Thermos on a side table, a picture of a turquoise lake amid mountains, and a black-and-white portable TV. The TV was switched on; it showed a grainy, badly tuned picture. This was what the man wanted us to witness.
He pointed toward the screen and hissed, ‘Beijing! Beijing!’
Through the grey fizz, we saw tanks, rolling. Tank after tank.
Then, abruptly, we were out again, onto the empty lane.
* * *
* * *
That evening or the next, Elena summoned us down the corridor. She must have waited, listening until she heard us arrive, the hotel girl leading with the keys, the door jarring on the floor, then waited a few more moments to allow the hotel girl to pad away downstairs again, before she let out her ululating cry. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her few books and a little box of drawing chalks scattered around her, incense burning at the window.
‘Hiya!’ I called out, but stopped short. Something in her face. ‘What’s happened?’
‘They’ve killed four thousand students in Beijing.’
Into our long moment of silence she spoke again.
‘It happened days ago. Only today did I hear. People running from Beijing are arriving. They could not get out of Beijing, for the shooting.’
Sean began pacing the tiny room, swearing and swearing. Then he sat down.
‘Do the art students know?’ he said.
‘Yes. The Tibetans are embracing them. It is dangerous for them. The police want the student leaders. They are not student leaders, but...’ Then Elena almost laughed. ‘They think they can stop it this way!’
‘Have you radio?’ asked Marek later. ‘Short wave?’ Again we had to say no. We had only the Walkman, the reggae tapes and The Doors. ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side).’
Soon the art students slipped away back to Xining or Chengdu or wherever they’d come from, the three of them in love with the world and each other, imaginative and brave, contesting the government by drawing flowers. ‘They said the heart was gone,’ said Elena.
Then: ‘Elena – where’s your dog?’
‘I gave him away. Nice people. They will look after him.’
* * *
* * *
Life went on. There was to be a fair, a race day, a gala. Elena had said so and, sure enough, to announce it, a couple of days later twenty or so Tibetan horsemen cantered through town wearing high hats and smart boots, white shirts blousing out, red sashes. Behind the hooves’ dust came policemen on bicycles.
It was nearing midsummer. On the appointed day people rode horses, walked, cycled upstream to a wide grassy glen a mile or two upriver, beyond the town. Some arrived on trailers drawn by tractors. The glen was enclosed by sharp, rough little hills; smudges of snow still lingered in the corries. Herding people had come down from the high grazings and erected windbreaks, white tents with blue circled designs, eternal knots in the corners. They lit fires and cooked meals, in huge cook-pots rested on stones. There were plenty of horses with tails tied, bells on their bridles, tethered to ropes laid on the ground. A great deal of horsetalk was going on, that much we could understand. ‘Chu-chu’ is what people said to horses, as they approached: ‘chu-chu.’
Old ladies tended the cook-pots and juniper fires. The smell was of woodsmoke and horses – and cordite, because there was a rifle range, gunfire echoing among the hills. Tinny music played. The men were in their best riding boots, the women in their finery, with braided hair, heavy earrings, beads. Someone unloaded a pool table from the back of a trailer. There was a tug-of-war. Gathered like this, come down from the hills, they must have learned about the protests and martial law and the clampdown and the killings. They must all have known.
The fair was presided over by a Living Buddha, a figure in yellow on a podium in a tent decorated with eternal knot symbols. The Living Buddha was flanked by two dignitaries. Girls wanted to present prayer scarves to the Rinpoche; we moved close enough to see what was going on. We watched one girl approach when she was summoned. She unwrapped her scarf from its paper, bowed three times and, holding the scarf out, began to sing. The crowd quietened as the girl sang against the volleys of gunshot from the rifle range, but her nerves got the better of her, she faltered, looked stricken, then dashed at the Rinpoche to present the scarf. Very soon after, the Rinpoche and his attendants left in a car, at speed. Some girls were still waiting to present their scarves; their expressions turned from excitement to disappointment.
I looked around for Elena. Why had the Rinpoche been hustled away at speed? Was he even a proper Rinpoche? Who were these dignitaries anyway, these minders? But Elena was nowhere to be found. In fact, we hadn’t seen her at the horse fair at all. Maybe she had other business to attend to, back in town, more important than answering all our questions.
* * *
* * *
It was evening, a few days later. In the Czechs’ room, the thin beds were pressed into service as sofas. We’d bought some beer and rigged up the Walkman with its tinny speakers. There was Elena, Sean, me, the Czechs – not much language in common. But we had The Doors, again. We played ‘Take It As It Comes’ and ‘The End.’
Alois had found some caterpillars – they were alive and eating leaves in petri dishes on the windowsill. I don’t know how I’d ever thought Elena was anything but Italian. For all her asceticism and Tibetan modes and her dark attire, she had a particular pout of outraged sensibility that she wore when Marek was about. And, as for the butterfly collector: ‘He is killing these butterflies! This is not good. This the Tibetans will not like!’
‘What will he do with these butterflies?’ she demanded of Marek.
‘He makes swap. Also, he will give the collection to the town where he lives. He is a farmer, with an orchard.’
‘Apples,’ said Alois unexpectedly, through his beard. ‘Mushrooms.’
Elena sat back on the bed and studied him, blowing a bubble with her gum. When the bubble was huge, she popped it with her tongue.
‘You like these Tibetans?’
‘Yes.’
The moment was over. ‘Now,’ said Marek, filling the room with his bonhomie, ‘we will drink beer!’
We drank beer. Elena even accepted a cigarette. Zenek, shorn-headed now in a way that showed his bone structure, had acquired a little sprig of juniper, which he lit and let smoulder, and the room took on a fug. It grew dark enough for candles, so shadows played. In the midst of all the languages we spoke, in the concrete room with stained walls, we held a little soirée, then retired to our various beds.
* * *
* * *
The door. A key fumbling in the lock, then the door crashing open. At least it tried to crash, but as ever it jarred on the floor, giving us a few seconds to wake and scramble to our feet. Then the light was flicked on, and in its glare I saw the pale hotel girl’s terrified face as three policemen shoved past her into the room, stars at their shoulders, guns at their sides. We were in nightclothes, Sean and me, T-shirts and underwear. The police filled the room; the main man had a cigarette hanging from his lips, an overcoat with epaulettes slung from his shoulders, like he had watched too many movies. The girl stood in the doorway, paralysed with fear.
Then all the men were shouting, the police in Chinese. Sean, taller by a good head, physically much broader, was bawling back, ‘Fuck off! Just fuck off!’
‘Papers!’ they demanded. ‘Passports!’
‘Just get out!’
By a lewd gesture they demanded to know if we were sleeping together.
‘Fuck off!’ roared Sean.
They shouted for a while more, then t
hrust us back into our room with a signal to stay there, and hauled the door closed.
We heard commotion in the corridor. More shouting, a door banging, but then they were gone. Just putting the wind up us, the foreigners. Letting us know we’d overstepped some mark. In due course we slept.
In the morning, we found a torn-off sheet of purple paper shoved under our door. It showed a hasty drawing in biro of a mountain and a strange tree and a huge jagged sun, and the words ‘See you!’
We ran down the corridor at once. Elena’s door was wide open and already the hotel girl was sweeping out the room. The girl didn’t even glance at us as we entered. On the mattress lay a couple of pairs of knickers, some colouring pencils and a few loose pages of a book Elena had been translating, something about occult religions. I gathered up those things.
There was a fresh stain on the wall, as though tea had been thrown. The room seemed lighter, somehow. With her back to us, the hotel girl swept up a few stray dark hairs, dog hairs, some sunflower-seed husks. I wanted to say something to this young woman, by touch or gesture. She’d been so scared, what with the police and their guns. ‘She’s nice,’ Elena had reported. ‘It is difficult for her.’
We took the hint and left too. Besides, there were no strikes now, not any more. Before we went I walked up the hill by the monastery to a low summit where a collection of prayer flags fluttered, tied to sticks. I was wearing an old yellow silk scarf, which I took off and tied among the bits of cloth. What for? For the students in Beijing. For the whole damn mess. For the suffering world. How long did that scarf last, I wonder, till its last thread was shredded and blown away?
Some squares of white paper were tumbling along the grass and wildflowers by my feet, goodness knows where from, there was no one else around. I caught one as it fluttered past. It showed a little printed picture, red on white, of a winged horse rearing through the air. I kept it. It seemed a fair swap: a silk scarf to stay, a wind horse to go.
* * *
* * *
High on the plateau, at about ten thousand feet, lies a vast, shallow salt lake so large you can’t see the far shore. Lake Quinghai. In different languages, Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, it is called ‘green lake’ or ‘blue lake’ or ‘teal lake.’
We went there, a sixty-mile bus ride from Xining. The lake, cupped among low grassy hills, was large and still enough to shimmer in the breeze and, in the evening light, pink mirages wavered on its watery horizon. A sharp northern wind blew small waves ashore, a wind that had crossed Mongolia.
All around were low hills, a seemingly endless rumpled land. Late snow lingered on distant summits. Again, this was grazing country. In folds in the hills, lines of smoke rose from nomads’ yurts. Sheep and yaks were white and brown dots on the hillsides. Sometimes a shout reached us, as a herd called to keep the flock in check.
There was a lakeside settlement called Heimahe, just a few flat-roofed roadside shacks and stores and telegraph poles beside the unmetalled road. At a little hostel or truck stop there, we took rooms. It was a place given to rain; deep cloud-reflecting puddles had formed. Heavy trucks passed through and, at the roadside, women sold carp caught in the lake, holding them out to the passing trucks. If a police vehicle or an official vehicle bounced into view, they hid the fish behind their backs and affected nonchalance.
It was good to be out of town. From the settlement, a short path led down to the lakeside. There, from among the sparse grasses of the shore, larks rose singing, and wildflowers grew between salt-crusted pebbles. The scent of the flowers was so strong it burned your nose.
Also at the shore was a row of eight chorten made of prickly juniper wood lashed together with white wool. The evening we arrived, I watched a lone monk arrive at the shore to meditate. First he made a burned-barley offering at a cairn of stones, then he settled himself cross-legged on the ground, and began reading, part chanting, from a book of scripture on his lap. The book was long and thin. He had a bowl, made of a human skull.
It was here we met Elena again. This we hadn’t expected, but when I went back to the hostel there was Sean, grinning, walking across the courtyard with Elena by his side. We met with whoops of delight. We’d been worried. But ‘It was nothing,’ she shrugged. The police had just threatened and shouted and insisted she leave town on the first bus.
‘So I came here!’
Gravely, in the half-light of another grubby room, I handed Elena the drawing pencils and pages, a precious burden, and she thanked me, but at the underwear she smiled. Dark blue, no-nonsense knickers. ‘Now this I really missed!’
A clean river ran down from the hills here, one of many that fed the lake. Inland from the road it meandered in a deep channel between grassy banks before finding its way to the shore. Bright yellow wagtails prissed about on its bank, a merganser swam.
Elena and I walked beside the river. The cooling sky was tinted with wisps of mauve reflected in the slow water. Sean had gone into the clear light with his camera. There was a high-altitude expansiveness in the sky and a cool sense that summer was over, although no one knew it yet. A thumbprint of rainbow in the west. White mountain peaks.
‘What will you do now?’ she asked. It seemed we were in a mood to exchange confidences, now we were unobserved, in the peace of the hills. I told Elena I had made this long trip, this strange adventure, to escape a hasty marriage. Now I had to go home and face the disappointments and anger, the financial mess. I had to see my husband and seek his agreement to part. We couldn’t go on. That much had become clear to me.
‘Then you will be happy,’ she said, simply, walking at my side. I hoped so, because I hadn’t been, and neither had he.
‘And what about you?’ I asked.
‘I will perhaps go to India. But Lhasa is my home.’
‘Not Italy?’
‘No. In Italy I was nearly dead.’
I looked at her quickly and she laughed, with her dark sorry-merry eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Heroin! You are surprised! Yes. Heroin. In Milan, I was nearly dead.’
We remained a couple of days more, walking into the hills. Then we left. During the last night came a storm of wind and rain, thunder and lightning over the hills and the lake. In the morning, Elena presented us with ‘a box of good luck things,’ as she called it. A little box containing an aniseed, a few inches of striped Tibetan ribbon, two pressed flowers, a piece of incense.
We went back to Xining, and from there turned for home.
* * *
* * *
In the late winter of that same year, or very early the next, when I had parted from my then husband and was living in a rented room in Edinburgh, I received a postcard via my parents’ address.
The parents, the unthought of. I am old enough now to feel for all those parents: of the State-murdered students, of those lost to heroin, of those who wander off and never come home.
The card was from the country still then known as Czechoslovakia. There, student demonstrations had escalated to involve the workers, had become a general strike, had swollen into a mass movement. Half a million people had filled Wenceslas Square – we saw all this on TV. Then came the fall of the Communist regime of forty years.
The card was from Zenek. It was one of his own absurdist photographs. A man with elaborate paper wings strapped to his arms was about to take a step off a kerb. At the bottom he’d written ‘We are learning fly!’
Sean became a film cameraman, working in sometimes distant and difficult locations. He has a family now. We never saw Elena again, but I still think about her now and again, especially when I feel helpless, as when news comes of some new outrage in the suppression of Tibet, or of yet another atrocity elsewhere in the world. Recently a spate of self-immolations spread to Labrang/Xiahe. There are pictures on the Internet of a body in flames by the monastery wall. Of monks rising in protest, soldiers on the
streets.
‘Only when we have been heartbroken can we be truly happy’ was almost the first thing she said to us. Visualise the sentient beings who are without happiness. Determine to place them in joy. Think – May they be happy. Maybe it’s a fully worked out spiritual position, tenable for a student of Tibetan Buddhism, for a recovering addict, for one reincarnated from the almost-dead into a state of willed joy.
And the art students, barely out of their teens. I regret I didn’t learn their names, or begged or bought one of their sketches, because I have often thought about them, too. They said they were fighting the government with beauty. ‘Do you understand?’ Elena had demanded of Marek, who doubtless became one of the half-million people filling Wenceslas Square. The government will fall!
Do you understand?
Elders
UNDER THE PLASTIC LID, a tundra landscape, as seen from the air. Blooms of bottle green, circlets of paler green, of fawn.
‘Dad!’ I said. ‘You can’t eat this. Why in god’s name won’t you keep it in the fridge?’
My father is shrinking. He leans on a stick.
‘Why don’t you eat them when we bring them? On the same day?’
Down the toilet went several small, once-nutritious portions. We are good daughters, my sister and me. Trying to be. We’ve taken to bringing round food because, we insisted, a daily bowl of soup and the innards of a white bread roll are not enough.
My dad’s bungalow is comfortable. He can afford – we can afford – to keep it heated. He has been widowed for a decade and, before that, he was chief carer for my mother following her stroke. Hence the move to within a couple of miles of me and my then-young family. We weren’t going anywhere, not then, so my parents moved close.
Friends say it’s a good arrangement. Not having to do state visits. Not having to drive half-roads across the country every weekend.
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