Love In No Man's Land

by Duo Ji Zhuo Ga

  Despite their limited education, the grasslanders anticipated the college entrance exam with enthusiasm. In the weeks leading up to it, Shida shut himself away in his tent and pored over his tattered schoolbooks, writing notes and memorising facts day and night. When he came across something he didn’t understand, he went to find Teacher Pubu at the tent school on the other side of the lake.

  ‘Do you think I have a chance of passing?’

  Shida and Pubu emerged from the tent side by side as the sun sank behind the mountains. They followed the narrow path along the lakeshore to where the solitary yak-skin boat lay.

  ‘Everyone’s coming to this from more or less the same situation. And because we’re a minority group, we’re apparently eligible for extra points. As long as you put the work in, you’ll pass.’ Pubu glanced at Shida, who had a full beard and was already a father of two.

  Shida nodded vigorously and got into the yak-skin boat. Pubu untied the rope for him and watched him row off into the distance.

  Having a relative at college was a significant high-status achievement for the entire family, equivalent to having a highly educated geshe monk in the family, so when Shida got his results, Cuoe Grassland was exultant. He was the first person from the grassland to go to college and everyone came together in spontaneous celebration, singing and dancing through the night.

  The day he left, Shida wore a large red flower and a portrait of Chairman Mao the size of his palm. His neck was hung with tens of khata. As he waved his goodbyes to the people who were seeing him off, he looked back at the grassland. The wife his father had chosen for him held onto their two children in the middle of the crowd and stared blankly at her toes. Shida’s gaze didn’t rest on her but travelled over the grasslanders’ heads to the black gravel shore of azure-coloured Cuoe Lake where he and Yangji had played together when they were young. The two of them could have been a couple, a couple everyone spoke fondly of, but because he’d been weak and foolish, their story had become the great, indelible pain of his heart.

  Then let the painful grassland stay only in his heart.

  ‘You really don’t want to ever come back?’ That night, Shida stayed at Gongzha’s house in the county town.

  ‘I feel like it was me that drove Yangji to her death. Everything on the grassland reminds me of the times we spent together, and there’s no escaping it, day in, day out, to the point where I feel like I’m going mad,’ Shida said bitterly. ‘I’m not planning on coming back. After I graduate, I’m going to move to a city and work there. I don’t care where I go, as long as it makes me forget this place.’ He clasped his hands behind his head and stared up at the fabric-covered ceiling.

  Gongzha lay on the couch opposite, not knowing what to say. He thought of Cuomu, and the times they spent together, and his heart began to hurt.

  ‘Don’t forget to look up Zhuo Mai when you get to Shanghai. He’s the director of the surgery department at a big hospital there. Yihang’s grown up now and the two of them might come to the grassland for their summer holidays next year.’

  ‘Time’s gone so fast… When I think back to how we all used to sing and dance and hunt together on the grassland, it seems like a dream.’

  ‘It does.’ Gongzha inhaled deeply, then switched off the light. The room glowed gently in the moonlight. ‘Yangji is gone, Cuomu is gone, Zhuo Mai is single but has a son. You’re married, the father of two children, and about to go to college. As for me, I have a job but no Cuomu.’

  As the two men talked, the night slowly fell quiet. The moonlight shone through the small window and made the terrazzo floor gleam.

  *

  Like every head of the household on the grassland, Gongzha took his family responsibilities seriously. He concerned himself with everything, no matter how important or how minor, from what sort of woman his brother should marry to what kind of clothing their tent should make that year. But always at the back of his mind was the knowledge that one day he must head off in search of Kaguo and avenge his woman’s death. He could not forget Cuomu’s bright black eyes and on countless nights would wake to her mournful cry: ‘Find Kaguo, take revenge.’ On one such night, frightened awake yet again, he stared up at the dark sky and resolved that he could put it off no longer; he had to find Kaguo and honour the fallen spirit of his lover with the bear’s life.

  The rain and wind of the grassland had long shaped the immature youngster into a hardy man. By now Gongzha had a full beard and hair that fell to his shoulders. His tanned face was as rough as sand and as he walked the dusty streets of the county town, his eyes glittered with a fierce light. He submitted his resignation and strode freely out of the door of his work unit. He had waited for many years and now the time had come. Cuomu’s smiling face seemed to be getting more insistent, and his yearning for her only deepened.

  He took his mother to Lhasa to consult a specialist there, arranged by an old friend of Zhuo Mai’s who was the head of an army hospital. The specialist’s conclusion was that Dawa was suffering from a psychotic disorder that may have been triggered by a significant trauma. He prescribed perphenazine. Gongzha and Dawa returned to the county town.

  With his mother’s condition now taken care of, Gongzha went back to his old home on the grassland. He still had one more significant task to undertake: to fulfil Zhaduo’s wishes and make the Buddha’s light shine once more on the grassland.

  The day he got back to the grassland, the herders were meeting to discuss the allocation of pastureland. Other areas of the country had already begun using the land-contract system and that particular wind was now blowing across the grassland. Once the pastureland was divided up, the herders would no longer follow a nomadic existence, leading their animals to where the water and grass were. Whether fixing the herders’ feet to one spot would be a good or bad thing, no one knew. There was no way of telling whether it would have a positive or negative outcome. But people were instinctively excited about yet another new idea for the grassland. They would have their own pasture and their own yaks and sheep and there’d be no more having to set off for work at the sound of a whistle or returning home at a specific time.

  They had already discussed how many yaks and sheep a family of a certain size should get, and this then determined the size of their pasture. There was also the question of horses. Horses had big bellies. One horse ate more grass than five sheep, but when they divided up the pasture, a horse was only allocated as much land as a sheep, while a yak was given an area the equivalent of three sheep. Because this enormous consumer of grass could supply the herders with neither meat nor wool, herders no longer wanted to keep horses. And now that public roads were being built on the grassland, horses weren’t critical for getting around either. Many horses now ran wild on the grassland.

  Building roads on the grassland was straightforward. The land was mostly flat – apart from the mountain slopes that needed to be levelled and the marshy areas around the lakeshore – and a road was effectively in place as soon as a car drove across it.

  Gongzha’s second-youngest brother came back from the meeting about dividing up the pastureland. When he saw Gongzha, he waved. ‘Brother, we’ve been given five gang and four valleys, over by the side of Chanaluo; the pasture there is pretty good.’ A gang was a unit of area that all the herders in Changtang understood, though no one could say how many hectares it was and no one had ever tried to measure it.

  Gongzha nodded.

  Gongzan, the family’s second son, was stacking yak pats. He turned and said with a grin, ‘According to Luobudunzhu, the public road will reach us in ten days at most. When that happens, let’s get a motorbike. It’ll be faster for us to go see you and Ama in the county town.’

  ‘Alright.’ Gongzha was staring at the distant mountains and replied without turning his head.

  ‘A lot of the household heads at the meeting today were talking about buying one. This is good – we won’t have to ride horses to herd anymore.’ Third Brother chuckled. ‘Brother, if we get a m
otorbike, shouldn’t we sell the horses?’

  ‘You should hold on to two of the good ones – we still want to take part in the summer races,’ Gongzan reminded him with a laugh.

  ‘Keep mine. The others you can decide on as you see fit.’ Gongzha turned and went into the tent. ‘I’ll go back to the county town in a couple of days and buy you your motorbike.’

  His brothers’ laughter circled the tent.

  The herders’ way of life, barely altered for a thousand years, began to change. With the pastures now divided between them, the herders worked harder than ever and their lives became fuller. Some of them even built small houses on their land near the public road and the elders and the children stayed there while the men went to the pasture. Gongzan’s woman already had two children and their house was getting noisy.

  Gongzha did not just buy a motorbike, he also bought a walking tractor. He and his brothers were busy – the three of them divided the workload and laboured hard every day. That Gongzha was still single troubled his brothers. They felt that their elder brother should either join them and become the real head of the household or find a woman in the city to take care of and start a home there. But Gongzha’s mood remained sombre, and he rarely spoke.

  It was unthinkable on the grassland that a man would stay single his whole life because of a woman who’d died long ago. Life on the Changtang Plateau was tough enough without giving yourself the extra challenge of remaining true to a long-dead love. The snow fell when it wanted and the rain blew when it wanted; the heavens might be unhappy at any time and disaster could come at any point. Even the thinnest layer of snow did not melt easily and when it blanketed the pasture, the yaks and sheep had no grass to eat and could only starve to death. In those harsh, inhospitable highlands, death was a fact of life.

  No one understood Gongzha. Of course, Gongzha did not need anyone to understand him. He was only true to his own heart.

  No one was sure on which day Cuoe Temple (still missing its bodhisattvas) began to have offerings again: at first some apples and fruit sweets quietly appeared, then a thread of light blue incense, then the five-coloured prayer flags. Nor could anyone say on which day an old monk called Basang appeared on the grassland, carrying a cushion and with a sheepskin chuba draped over his shoulders. No one knew where he came from. He went straight up the mountain, pushed open the temple door that had remained shut for so many years, and moved into one of the small rooms in the complex. The next day, he took up a broom and swept the temple clean inside and out.

  Cuoe Temple slowly began to feel lived-in again.

  The question was, where were the Buddha and bodhisattva statues hidden?

  One day, Gongzha was sitting daydreaming in his brothers’ tent halfway up the mountain when Gongzan came in.

  ‘Elder Brother, Guxiula Basang is looking for you.’

  Gongzha lifted his head and was about to stand when Basang, the old monk newly arrived at Cuoe Temple, came in bowing and coughing; his robe was dirty and his hair was dishevelled. He clasped his hands together in greeting. ‘Dear Gongzha, I have something to ask of you.’

  ‘Guxiula, please take a seat.’ Gongzha stood up and invited the old man to sit on the main cushion.

  Gongzan’s woman poured butter tea and handed the old man and Gongzha their bowls with both hands, then turned away and went about her business.

  ‘My name is Basang,’ the monk said quietly. ‘I was once a disciple of Cuoe Temple’s living Buddha. Very soon after the Cultural Revolution came, the living Buddha told me to leave the grassland. Recently I heard that things here had calmed down again.’ He looked at Gongzha then took a sip of tea.

  ‘That time was hard; all the monks had to leave.’ Gongzha sighed and refilled the old man’s cup. ‘Why have you come to see me?’

  ‘I’ve heard that the government has started rebuilding damaged temples and I’d like to submit an application for the refurbishment of Cuoe Temple and the recasting of some new bodhisattvas. You, dear Gongzha, worked for the government and are familiar with the process, so I wanted to ask you to help me.’

  After the Cultural Revolution was over, the government set about rectifying the mistakes of that period. Zhaduo had been restored to the status of living Buddha, and the grassland, which had been in turmoil for ten years, had settled down again. Many places were filing reports asking for their damaged temples to be repaired.

  ‘Of course I’ll help you,’ Gongzha replied quickly. Hadn’t it been Zhaduo’s dying wish that the Buddha’s light be restored to the grassland? Helping return Cuoe Temple to its former glory would honour his request, and the Medicine Buddha and those ancient little bodhisattvas he was hiding would have somewhere to go.

  The application was swiftly approved. The government gave 150,000 yuan to fix the temple. During the Cultural Revolution, the temple compound had been taken over by the Red Guards and used as their headquarters, and afterwards it had served as a storage depot for the collective’s food. This had actually helped protect the temple, and its original buildings and murals were still intact. The only things that were missing were the sacred Buddha statues and little gold bodhisattvas, which were national treasures, and an ancient tanka or religious scroll painting.

  Using the budget of 150,000 yuan and under Gongzha’s direction, the temple invited artisans from Chamdo to make replacement sculptures of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Gradually, the scattered monks returned to the temple. Some were known and others were not, but no one objected to this. When a man entered a temple and put on his robes, he was a disciple of Buddha and no one questioned his status.

  Everyone in the area came to the unveiling of the Buddha, bringing tea bricks, butter and dried meat. The new great hall had two levels. On the upper level new rugs had been neatly laid out; on the lower level was a terrazzo floor. The believers sat on the floor and listened to the deep, resonant chanting of the scriptures. Butter lamps flared once more and the long-absent light of the Buddha filled the hall. Basang, who was in the first monk’s seat, glanced at Gongzha’s back and a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  The next day, when the monk on duty rose early to sweep the temple, he discovered that the door to the great hall was open. He was afraid that a thief had broken in, but on checking he discovered that nothing was missing. In fact, in front of the Jampa Buddha there now stood several small bodhisattvas from the collection of Vajrapanis that Living Buddha Zhaduo had personally taken care of. News spread rapidly that the Buddhas and bodhisattvas of Cuoe Temple had acted and made the lost bodhisattvas return to the temple.

  *

  That night, Gongzha sat in a field beside Cuoe Lake. Its deep blue water gleamed faintly and the vast grassland beyond was so silent it seemed to be from a different age. In the distance, Chanaluo Snow Mountain loomed, as striking as ever, stealing the radiance of the grassland by night just as it did by day.

  Gongzha used a blade of grass to etch a ¤ on the ground. The symbol was always circling in his mind, tormenting him, but mostly he didn’t dare dwell on its meaning because of the heart-breaking pain it conjured. Unlike most grassland men, who could make their home anywhere there was grass, as long as their tent had their woman in it, Gongzha could not find peace. His heart had stopped that afternoon all those years ago, when the sand and wind had ravaged the plain; had stopped in the darkness of that day.

  He stood at the foot of the mountain and lifted his face to look at Chanaluo. It was so high, so bright, so formidable. Thin clouds drifted around the peak as they might around a flagpole.

  Climbing the mountain was easy, and he reached the first ridge without even breaking a sweat. He stood motionless on the ridge, his old sheepskin chuba tied around his waist, his narrow eyes shining with a cold, hard light, his beard full, and his long, tousled hair streaming out behind him in the snowy wind.

  On the frozen snow in the sunlit valley that enormous ¤ symbol had given off a strange glow. Why had the bears wanted to make that symbol? What did it
mean? Gongzha closed his eyes; he had no answers.

  He knew that Kaguo was still on the mountain. The light, acrid scent on the wind told him so; he was a good hunter and his nose never deceived him. He didn’t head up the snow valley but instead climbed straight up the mountainside. He wanted to go to that ledge. He hadn’t managed to get a close look last time because he’d been injured.

  The mysterious large black boulder was still there, but the stones around it looked different because of avalanches. Gongzha walked round the boulder twice, but apart from confirming that it was not a natural feature of the landscape, he gleaned no other information.

  He sat cross-legged on the boulder and lifted a section of the black chain. It was heavy and so cold to the touch that when he held it he felt as if he was being pricked by countless tiny needles. Its links were tightly forged, and its end looked as if it was growing out of the rock – no matter how hard he yanked it, it didn’t budge. How had it got there? Why had it been set in there? The legend about the tethering of the Wolf Spirit had circulated generation after generation, and every generation’s version was the same. But in the end, a myth was a myth, and it was not the same as a logical explanation. Gongzha didn’t believe in myths, even though he enjoyed hearing them. He didn’t believe that sacred beings came down to earth and he didn’t believe that a spirit would save you if you didn’t work hard. Everything originated somewhere, and everything had a purpose. But where had it originated, and what was its purpose?

  Gongzha stood up, tightened his leather chuba around him and walked from one side of the large black boulder to the other, then back again. Then he began circling it, speeding up as he went, taking longer and longer strides. Finally he sat down and let his dizziness slowly settle until he could see the landscape in front of him clearly again. The snow mountain loomed tall, and far below, Cuoe Lake stretched into the distance, blanketed with mist as usual.