Zhu hesitated, but only for a moment: the dormitory was freezing, and it wasn’t even winter yet. She lay down next to Xu Da, facing away. An older novice went around and blew out the lamps. Lanterns in the internal corridor lit the dormitory’s window-paper from behind, turning it into a long stripe of gold in the darkness. The other novices whispered and rustled around her. Zhu trembled with exhaustion, but she couldn’t sleep before learning the characters Prefect Fang had set her. She mouthed the words of the primer song, carefully tracing the shape of each character onto the floorboards with her finger. Heaven and earth, dark and yellow. She kept dozing off and jerking back awake. It was torture, but if this was the price to pay—she could pay it. I can do this. I can learn. I can survive.
She was on the last line of four characters when the light coming through the window-paper dimmed and changed angle, as if a breeze had rushed through and disturbed the lantern flames. But the night was still. A prickle of fear raised chicken-skin under her new clothes, although she couldn’t say why. Then, projected against the illuminated window-paper, shadows appeared. People, gliding in succession down the corridor. Their hair hung long and tangled, and Zhu could hear their voices as they passed: a lonely, unintelligible murmur that was familiar even as it made her shudder.
In the days since leaving Zhongli, Zhu had all but convinced herself that the sight of her father and brother’s ghosts had been nothing more than a nightmare born of shock and hunger. Now she saw that unearthly procession, and in an instant it was real again. Her fear surged. She thought desperately: It’s not what I think it is. What did she know about monasteries? There would be some ordinary explanation. There had to be.
“Novice Xu,” she said urgently. She was embarrassed by the quaver in her voice. “Big brother. Where are they going?”
“Who?” He was half-asleep, his body comfortingly warm against hers as she shivered.
“The people in the corridor.”
He directed a sleepy glance at the window-paper. “Mmm. The night proctor? He’s the only one out and about after curfew. He makes rounds all night.”
Zhu’s liver curled with dread. Even as Xu Da spoke, the procession continued. Their shadows were as clear on the window-paper as trees against the sunset. But he hadn’t seen them. She remembered the white-clad shapes she’d seen in that dark recess, clustered around the offerings. It had been dark in that space, as it was night now, and she knew from the stories that the spirit world’s essence was yin: its creatures belonged to the dark and damp and moonlight. I can see ghosts, she thought in terror, and realized her body had clenched around itself so tightly that her muscles ached. How could she sleep now? But just as her fear peaked, the parade came to an end. The last ghost vanished, and the light stilled, and ordinary tiredness rushed back into her with a speed that made her sigh.
Her breath in Xu Da’s ear roused him. He murmured with amusement, “Buddha preserve us, little brother. Prefect Fang got one thing right about you. You stink. Good thing it’s bath day soon—”
Zhu was suddenly wide awake, ghosts forgotten. “Bath day?”
“You missed summer, we used to get one a week. Now we only get one a month until it gets warm again.” He went on, dreamily, “Bath days are the best. No morning devotions. No chores, no lessons. The novices have to heat the bathwater, but even then we get to sit in the kitchen and drink tea all day long…”
Thinking of the communal latrine, Zhu had a terrible feeling about where this was headed. “Do we all take turns?”
“How long would that take, with four hundred monks? Only the Abbot gets to wash by himself. He goes first. Us novices go last. The water’s mud by that time, but at least they let us stay in as long as we want.”
Zhu saw an image of herself naked in front of several dozen male novices. She said adamantly, “I don’t like baths.”
A distinctly human figure entered the corridor and banged a split bamboo stick on the outside of the dormitory door. “Silence!”
As the night proctor strode away, Zhu stared into the darkness and felt sick. She’d thought that to be Chongba, it was enough to do what Chongba would have done. But now, belatedly, she remembered how the fortune teller had read Zhu Chongba’s fate in his pulse. His fate had been in his body. And for everything she had left behind in Zhongli, she was still in her own body: the body that had received the nothing fate, and which now saw ghostly reminders of it all around her. The corridor light reflected faintly off the golden statue and its thousand watching eyes. How could she have had the temerity to think she could fool Heaven?
In her mind’s eye she saw the three characters of her brother’s name in Prefect Fang’s slashing writing, with her own shaky version beneath. She hadn’t written it, as Prefect Fang had, but only drawn it. An imitation, without anything in it of the real thing.
* * *
Bath day wasn’t until the end of the week, which in a way was worse: it was like seeing that the road ahead had collapsed down the side of the mountain, but not being able to stop. As Zhu quickly discovered, there was no pause in monastery life. Lessons, chores, and more lessons, and each evening there were new characters to learn, and the previous day’s to remember. Even the thought of sharing the night with ghosts wasn’t enough to prevent her from falling asleep the moment she let herself succumb to exhaustion, and in what seemed like an instant it was morning devotions all over again. In its own peculiar way, life in the monastery was as unvarying as it had been in Zhongli village.
That morning she and Xu Da were knee deep in a sunken stone trough full of freezing water and dirty sheets: instead of lessons, it was the monastery’s twice-monthly laundry day. Now and then another novice brought over a pan of slimy boiled soap beans and dumped it into the trough. Other novices rinsed and wrung and starched and ironed. The courtyard’s ginkgo trees had turned yellow and dropped their fruit all over the flagstones, which added an unpleasant smell of baby vomit to the proceedings.
Zhu scrubbed, preoccupied. Even knowing her body anchored her to the nothing fate, she refused to accept the idea that she should simply give up and let Heaven return her to that fate. There had to be a way to keep going as Zhu Chongba—if not permanently, then at least for a day, a month, a year. But to her despair, the better she understood her new daily routines, the less opportunity she saw. In a monastery, every moment of every day was accounted for: there was nowhere to hide.
“If they wash us less in the cold weather, you’d think we could skip a few laundry days, too,” Xu Da grumbled. Both their hands had turned bright red from the icy water, and ached fiercely. “Even spring ploughing is better than this.”
“It’s nearly lunchtime,” Zhu said, momentarily diverted by the thought. Meals were still the bright spots of every day.
“Only someone raised in a famine could get excited by refectory food. And I’ve seen you looking at those soap beans. You can’t eat them!”
“Why are you so sure?” Zhu said. “They’re beans; maybe they’re delicious.” Now that she’d mastered the playful, brotherly tone of the novices’ interactions, she found these exchanges pleasing. She couldn’t remember ever talking with Chongba.
“They’re soap,” Xu Da said. “You’d burp bubbles. I guess it could be worse. This is just a regular laundry day. That time the Prince of Henan visited, we had to do the sheets and wash and starch all the monks’ robes. You should have heard them rustle afterwards! It was like meditating in a forest.” He added, “The rebels visit too, but they’re just normal people; they aren’t a bother.” At Zhu’s blank look, he said, “From the peasant rebellion. It’s the biggest since before we were born. The Abbot hosts their leaders whenever they’re in the area. He says that as long as the monastery stays on everyone’s good side, we’ll do fine for ourselves until it gets settled one way or the other.”
Zhu thought it was a pity she couldn’t get on Prefect Fang’s good side. Her gloom rushed back in, heavier than ever. She asked miserably, “Big brother, are novices alw
ays expelled for making a mistake? Or are they sometimes just punished?”
“If Prefect Fang could get rid of every last novice, he probably would,” Xu Da said matter-of-factly. “The only time he bothers with punishment is if you’ve really annoyed him, and he wants to see you suffer.” Together they hauled out a sheet and slung it into the tub for the wringers. “He punished me once, when I was still new. We were fermenting the black bean harvest, and he made me stir the crocks. He made me so nervous that when he came to check on me, I knocked a whole crock onto him.” He shook his head and laughed. “Do you know how bad fermenting beans smell? The other monks called him Fart Fang, and they refused to sit next to him for devotions or in the meditation hall until the next laundry day. He was furious.”
There was a clacking in the distance: the proctor’s advance warning for lunch.
“It was the Mid-Autumn Festival after that. Usually us novices climb the mountain to see the monastery all lit up with lanterns. But Prefect Fang made me clean the latrine instead. He said it was fitting that I be the stinky one. And it was ages until the next bath day, too.” Xu Da climbed out of the trough and started drying himself off. “But why are you worrying? Even Prefect Fang can’t kick anyone out without a good reason. You aren’t planning on doing anything wrong, are you?” He grinned at Zhu as the bell rang, and went bounding up the steps towards the refectory. “Come on! We’ve worked hard enough that even I’m looking forward to brined vegetables.”
Zhu trudged behind, thinking. Xu Da’s story had dislodged an idea. Whatever the likelihood of success, just having an idea filled her with a stubborn hope that felt more authentic than any despair.
But for all that she told herself it would work, her heart was still pounding as hard as if she had run up every one of the monastery’s staircases, with fear.
* * *
The other novices clearly found bath day as exciting as the New Year had been to them in their lay lives. In contrast, Zhu woke with a feeling of dreadful anticipation that persisted through the treats of lying abed until the sun rose; taking breakfast in the kitchen instead of the refectory; and endless cups of tea while they stoked the fires under the giant cauldrons of water for the bathhouse.
“Novice!” The kitchen’s fire master threw a shoulder pole at her. “The Abbot must be nearly done. Take a couple of buckets of hot water to the bath to warm it for the department heads.”
As Zhu caught the pole her sense of the world narrowed to a point of grim focus. If this is the way, then it’s up to me to do it. And I can. I have to.
Absorbed in her thoughts, she startled when Xu Da came up and took one of her buckets. Probably he had seen her inwardness, but mistook it for exhaustion. “Let me help. You can help me on my turn.”
“That just means we both have to make two easier trips, rather than one hard trip each,” Zhu pointed out. Her voice sounded strange. “Wouldn’t you rather get it over with in one go?”
“Where’s the fun in suffering by yourself?” Xu Da said in his good-natured way. Surprised, Zhu realized he was probably her friend. She’d never had a friend before. But she wasn’t sure suffering could be shared, even with one’s friends. Watching her father and brother die, digging their graves, kneeling for four days in front of the monastery: all of them had been acts of exquisite aloneness. She knew that when it came down to it, you survived and died alone.
But perhaps there was still a comfort in having someone at your side while it happened.
“Took you long enough!” Prefect Fang said when Zhu and Xu Da came into the bathhouse. He and the two other department heads had already shucked their robes and were perched on the side of the sunken tub. Their bodies were as wrinkled as dried dates awaiting the soup; even their male parts seemed to have shrunk until they resembled the Buddha’s own retracted organ. The steam swirling around them parted in the draft from the closing door, and Zhu flinched when she caught sight of what else occupied that damp, closed place. Ghosts lined the walls. They hung motionless, though the steam passing through their white-clad forms made them seem to shift and sway. Their blank eyes were fixed aimlessly on the middle distance. They paid no attention to Zhu or the naked monks. Zhu stared at them and forced herself to breathe. The ghosts’ death-altered appearance was disturbing in some fundamental way that left her guts in knots, but they didn’t seem—dangerous. They’re just a part of the place, she told herself, feeling an involuntary tremor race through her. No different from the steam.
“What are you looking at?” Prefect Fang snapped, and all of a sudden Zhu remembered her purpose. Her pulse crashed back into her awareness. “Fill it quickly, and go!”
Xu Da emptied his bucket into the tub. Zhu made to do the same. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Xu Da’s dawning horror, and his outstretched arm as he lunged towards her, but it was too late: she had already let it happen. The slippery bamboo floor snatched her sandals sideways from under her, her arms flailed, the heavy bucket leapt into the bath, and she was pulled in after.
For a moment she hung suspended in a bubble of warm silence. She had the urge to stay underwater, in that safe moment in which there was neither success nor failure. But she had already acted, and she was surprised to find that it created its own bravery: there was nothing else to do but continue, no matter how frightened she might be. Surfacing, she stood.
Xu Da and the three dried-up dates were looking at her with their mouths open. Zhu’s robe rose around her like a floating lotus leaf. A corona of dirt worked its way out of it and spread relentlessly through the clean bathwater.
“Prefect Fang,” said the Dharma Master repressively. “Why is your novice polluting our bath?”
Prefect Fang had gone so red that the grid of ordination scars on his scalp stood out stark white. He sprang into action with all the wrinkled flaps of his body flying, and in an instant had hauled Zhu out by the ear. She howled in pain.
He flung her across the room, right through the ghosts, and hurled the bucket at her. It smashed into her and knocked her over. “That’s right,” he said, trembling with rage. “Kneel.”
The touch of the ghosts’ insubstantial forms was like being pierced by a thousand ice needles. Zhu hauled herself to her knees with a stifled whimper. Her skin stung from the ghosts; her head rang from hitting the floor. She watched dizzily as Prefect Fang struggled to decide what to do with her. And it wasn’t just Prefect Fang watching. To her terror she could feel Heaven itself inspecting the shell of Zhu Chongba, as if sensing the presence of an irregularity within. Cold nothingness brushed the back of her neck, and despite the warmth of the bathhouse she trembled until her teeth chattered.
“You little dog turd,” Prefect Fang finally snarled. He snatched up the bucket and thrust it at Zhu’s chest. “Hold that over your head until the evening bell, and for every time it drops I’ll have you beaten one stroke with the heavy bamboo.” His wrinkled chest pumped furiously. “As for proper respect for your elders, and care for your work: you can meditate on these principles when you’re scrubbing yourself with cold well water. Bath day is a privilege. If I ever see, or even hear of you setting foot in the bathhouse ever again, I’ll have you expelled.”
He looked down at her with sadistic satisfaction. He knew exactly how much novices enjoyed bath day, and what he thought he was taking from her. And had she been any other novice, perhaps it would have been miserable: the never-ending grind of monastery life, with nothing at all to look forwards to.
Zhu shakily picked up the bucket. It was wooden, and heavy. She knew she would drop it hundreds of times before the evening bell rang. Hours of agony, and hundreds of beatings after that. It was such a terrible punishment that anyone else would have cried in fear and shame upon receiving it. But as Zhu raised the bucket overhead, her arms already trembling with effort, she felt her cold and fear burning away in the face of a relief so radiant that it felt like joy. She had done the impossible:
She had escaped her fate.
3
&nbs
p; 1347, SECOND MONTH
Zhu and Xu Da were perched astride the roof of the Dharma Hall, replacing the winter-damaged tiles. It was a dreamy place to be, suspended between the mackerel sky and a sea of glittering green roofs, their golden finials upcurling like waves. Past the tumble of courtyards, past even the valley, they could see a sliver of the shining Huai plain. All like things being connected, the shape of the clouds told them what that distant land looked like. There where the clouds resembled fish scales were lakes and rivers; there, where the clouds had the shape of shrubs, were the hills. And there beneath the slow-rising blooms of yellow dust: armies.
The sunshine was warm, and Xu Da had taken off his shirt and both robes to work half-naked in his trousers. At sixteen, the hard labor had already given him a man’s body. Zhu said a little tartly, “You’re asking to die, running around like that.” Prefect Fang never hesitated to wield his bamboo on novices who violated the rules of dignified monkly attire. Twelve-year-old Zhu, who felt an existential chill whenever she was forced to acknowledge the fact of her boyish but undeniably not-male body, appreciated Prefect Fang’s strictness more than anyone realized. “You think you’re that good-looking everyone wants to see you?”
“Those girls did,” Xu Da said with a smirk, meaning the village girls who had come, giggling, to make their offerings.
“Girls, always girls.” Zhu rolled her eyes. Being younger and not yet hostage to the compulsions of puberty, she found Xu Da’s obsession tedious. In her best imitation of the Dharma Master, she said, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.”
“Are you trying to convince me you’d be happy joining those dried-up papayas who spend their lives in the meditation hall?” Xu Da gave her a knowing grin. “They don’t desire. But you, I don’t believe it for a moment. Maybe it’s not girls yet, but anyone who remembers you coming to the monastery knows you know what it is to want.”
She Who Became the Sun Page 4