Clerval returns his letters to the shelf, pours himself some tea. He’s not hungry, only tired. He straightens his papers, lies down on his narrow mat on the dirt floor, tries to sleep.
_______village
My friend,
Sometimes it seems almost everyone in this book I’m translating is falling ill or suffering in some way. So many of them are young and live in a beautiful garden and still they get sick. The boy, Baoyu, endures many terrible fevers and hallucinations; at one point he falls into a coma, lies unresponsive to any herbs, drugs or charm water. And Daiyu, the cousin whom he loves, is often racked with nightmares. She lies on her couch, too weak to sit or eat, her face turned to the wall. There are many prescriptions and remedies but they rarely seem to work. When Baoyu loses his precious jade for a while, things only get worse. He grows deranged and Daiyu dies. But even before that, as if each life were either the incarnation or the result of a faltering dynasty, a corrupt system that must re-make itself in greater understanding, so many of the young ones suffer: Baoyu’s closest friend, Qin Zhong, dies of a sudden fever, the dismissed servant girl, Qingwen, “a mere nobody” as one of the household staff calls her, grows quiet and wastes away; dying, she gives her long fingernails as a keepsake to Baoyu. Jinchuan, the misunderstood maid, drowns herself in the well. “Don’t take it too much to heart,” the woman who wrongly accused her is told. “Just give her relatives some silver for her burial and you’ll be doing all a kind mistress could.” There are numerous bad omens as well, “The begonia at the foot of the steps was thriving, but then for no reason its branches withered.”
Still, there are good times. They walk through the garden with its pathways and pavilions, its flowers with such untranslatable names as huona, shifan, luyi; and willows and hanging lanterns. They write poems, drink heated wine, watch operas. They dress in luxurious silks and cover their windows with rare “soft-mist silk” that comes only in four colors: light blue, russet, pine-green and pink; from a distance it looks like smoke or mist. And they eat many delicacies: lotus-foot cakes flavored with fragrant osmanthus, pine-kernel rolls, pigeon eggs, sweet and savory pastries shaped like peonies and swans.
Throughout there’s a sense of precariousness, unease; this never ceases. I feel it beneath my skin as I translate, a wing slowly turning, a muted, threatening wind.
I write down these lives and think of you. How you kneel and weed in your garden, and pick up each weekly package left by your door. How you speak to no one. Always to no one. I don’t want to believe that you’re dead. Each night I hold one of your letters in my hand. Wooden carts clank along the street, and every now and then there’s the sound of a bell, crickets chirping from their bamboo cages. I wonder what you hear. Church bells? Children playing outside your garden wall?
The more I translate the more the world grows strange. The author I’m translating, Cao Xueqin, often interjects into the text a sense of withholding: “the rest need not be enumerated here,” or “no more of this,” or “but we can’t know all that he was feeling.” So I’ve increasingly come to feel the silence embedded in each word, and I go to sleep and wake up with that silence, that presence of the unsayable—as you and I are unsayable—among all the many words.
Your friend,
as ever, Clerval
Aosta, May 29
My Friend,
Month by month the sensation in my hands grows weaker. Sometimes when I pick, up a cup it clatters to the floor. I no longer know with what firmness to grasp things, how to gauge the correct pressure brought to bear. Maybe I shouldn’t write of such things, but I said I would speak plainly, and if I spoke only of the beauty of my garden I wouldn’t be speaking to you at all.
Yesterday after my morning’s weeding I read parts of the Purgatorio again. Virgil rinsed the dirt from Dante’s face and plucked a smooth green reed from the soil (as Cato had instructed) which he wound around his pupil’s waist. Such a tender gesture, small and clear and simple, yet somehow I hadn’t noticed it before.
“And there he made me clean,” Dante said. The mud was soft, the reed supple. So much ugliness behind them. Then they saw how the proud must carry great stones on their backs, and not walk upright but creep doubled over, and how the envious are the color of a bruise.
I don’t dream much, but that night I dreamed I wore a medieval leper’s costume and carried a wooden clapper. My hat was brown and wide-brimmed; a piece of gauze around its rim covered my whole face. When I looked through it everything was inscribed with fine, minute hatchings. I didn’t mind them, really—it was as if I was looking through a microscope’s lens, everything more specific and enlarged—the only bad part was that it all seemed slightly unreal, removed. With each step I shook my clapper as was required.
But the odd part was that, as in old illuminated manuscripts, a holy man came near to heal me (he had me kneel before him as he reached out with his right hand to place two fingers on my head) but I got up and walked away. Why would I do such a thing? Why wouldn’t I have wanted to be healed?
I think of you in China. I wonder what species of flowering plants you’re seeing, what names they have for them, what uses they might be put to, medicinal or ornamental. I wonder what kind of house you live in and what you do with your days.
From my window I can see a long white chain, its links soft and unbroken. Tomorrow should bring a little rain, which will be good for the garden.
I think of you with fondness.
Your Friend,
Clerval sits at his desk barely moving, head lowered, mouth closed, his friend’s letter beside him. What would I see in his eyes if I could see them? When his hands begin to stir, he gently folds his friend’s letter, turns his face to the window, wipes his forehead, starts to write:
When I first began translating these pages, it didn’t occur to me so many characters would suffer from the cold. After all, there are many luxurious flowers in the garden, such a sense of what is tended. Yet the Lady Dowager’s servant brings her a hand-stove as she sits in her black sedan chair sheltered by a black umbrella, or reclines on her kang. Daiyu writes, “Snow covers the broom of the monk up on the hill,” and coughs ceaselessly, can’t stand the slightest chill. Each day she drinks a tonic of bird’s nest boiled in gruel. It’s made from the purest snow-water from Moon Crescent Nunnery; she can’t tolerate anything else, and she never eats cold things. “‘There,’ Xueyan said with a laugh, ‘that will carry away her illness,’ and with a pair of small silver Western scissors clipped the cord tied to the reel. The kite drifted away until soon it seemed no bigger than an egg, then dwindled to a speck like a black star…” But Daiyu doesn’t get well. The narrator comments, “The longing to be close ends in estrangement.” Snow falls and falls. They move through rooms called Pear Fragrance, Happy Red Court, Bamboo Lodge, but all the while something shivers deep inside them. All the while the Great Waste Mountain that Baoyu fell from as a stone casts its shadow near them. “The jade hairpin is broken, the red candle cold,” is the answer to one riddle.
on Beggar’s Bridge the crowds of poor standing, sitting, crawling, holding out their hands as I pass, my hands in my pockets, my white hands–
Father, what would you think of all I see?
WORKING NOTES FOR DRC:
—the name Zhen Shiyin is a homophone for “true facts concealed”
—the name Jia Hua is a homophone for “false talk” (Cao Xueqin is very fond of such names)
—there’s a practice in which rich families pay poor families’ sons to be priests or monks in their stead in order to ward off evil
—the following lines that Daiyu recites are from “The Western Chamber”:
What a riot of brilliant purple and tender crimson Among the ruined wells and crumbling walls
So many books inside this book. I wonder what my friend in Aosta would think—
Aosta, May 31
My Friend,
When you were here and we sat face to face for those few hours, you asked me
to speak, of my illness and its history but I refused. But yesterday I wrote to you about my hands, and today as I sit down to write I’m thinking about the lepers of Gloskar.
The island was desolate. “Small and lonely,” many called it, and in November 1651, it was chosen as the hospital site for the lepers of Aland. About sixteen were taken by boat to their new home: two cabins alongside a cattle byre and bakehouse. The wardens house stood some distance away.
The winters were very harsh and the cabins very quickly began to fall apart. There was no money to fix them. Cattle walked on snowdrifts high as roofs, and trampled the roofs of sheds to pieces. About a third of the patients died every year, most between November and April, and every year new patients arrived. Each year they petitioned Aland’s sheriff for firewood but were refused. Instead, they uprooted the island’s juniper bushes, used them until the land was bare. One day some set out in search of wood on other islands but their boat became trapped by ice floes and capsized. Somehow they managed to get back home and in milder months used the boat to ferry their cattle to pasture on outlying islands. They’d tend the cows each morning and night, then return to the island with fresh milk, the one thing they could manage for themselves.
(As I write this, I think of the way we’re so anxious to picture their skin, their hands, whatever deformities we associate with this illness, but their voices are silent. Silent even to me who shares their disease. Why don’t we think of their voices? Of what they said or what they read. Of a hunger that felt like any other hunger. Or of their names. Or of what they did hour by hour with their days.)
The warden pleaded to be released, but the authorities wouldn’t allow it. Finally, after five years, the hospital was closed. Imagine the remaining patients traveling in a wobbly chain of small boats over the sea. They were taken to another, farther island where no one spoke their language, where they understood nothing at all. The warden wrote to the king of Sweden, “I carried out my service in frost and cold. In autumn and spring I was often trapped in sea-ice. Thus have I now become an ailing man.”
I think, of their voices. Of the way I cant hear them. The way I can see the ice floes, cattle, roofs, but not a single individual face, not really.
Last night it rained as I thought it would.
Your Friend,
Clerval hunches over his writing table making lists of medicinal herbs he hopes to someday send to his friend. For my leper, he writes, and then, but why do I say “my” and with what arrogance, what presumption? Then crosses it all out. But I don’t know his name, he never told me his name
He writes to his friend who has no name, or no name he can know, and I live out my life without a name. Sometimes I still marvel that you gave me no name, though of course it makes sense—I was nothing you wanted.
The window’s darkening. He’s writing Daiyu over and over, then crossing it out.
Daiyu Dai yu die/you/I I/You
Then:
I want to know what happens to Miaoyu, the young nun from Sakyamuni Convent who calls herself “The One Outside the Threshold.” She lives in poverty keeps to herself, refuses to shave her head, gives plum blossoms to Baoyu. Widely read and well versed in the sutras, she’s come to the capital to see the relics of Guanyin.
There are so many people and stories in this novel it’s hard to keep track. Still, when I lie down I think of Miaoyu and how she holds herself apart, refers to herself sometimes as “The Odd One.”
My Friend in Aosta, could he also sign his name “The One Outside the Threshold”?—he who must never pass his garden walls.
I think of the violence inside the word threshold. “To trample, to tread,” my book says.
To enter a house one must cross a threshold, so is there violence in the very entering? As there’s violence in the many thresholds of the mind … Those first days after you left me I grew afraid of my thoughts as I watched distant windows, human shapes lit and shadowy behind them, sometimes touching, sometimes not.
What thresholds does Miaoyu keep herself away from in the world and in her mind? If she stays apart from Baoyu’s world, if she won’t step across that threshold, are there still others she must cross?
Is it possible never to cross or enter at all?
(She keeps her hair long, lives in poverty, stays to herself.)
“The One Outside the Threshold.” I’m nameless. Could that be my name?
from Chapter 17—
“If not for this hill,” observed Jia Zheng, “one would see the whole garden as soon as one entered, and how tame that would be.”
Aosta, June 5
My Friend,
I’ve been reading Marco Polo’s Travels, also known as The Description of the World. I who travel nowhere travel in this way. Sometimes in my mind I walk, up to your door, raise my hand to knock. If it’s winter when you read this, do you carry in your wide Chinese sleeves the tiny brass stoves I’ve read of? Do you hear the bells that hang from the necks of donkeys and camels laden with goods: bags of rice flour, tea, and the hard compound of clay and coal dust made up into tight balls that serves as fuel? Have you seen the great stone pagoda thirteen stories high, its four doors facing north, south, east and west that can only be reached by long ladders? At night when you dream, what country are you in? Or have such boundaries and categories dissolved—shape-shifted and redefined themselves in ways I can’t begin to know? (My garden walls, my weekly package at the door…)
Marco Polo wrote his book in prison. He dictated it to his cell-mate Rustichello, their voices traveling back and forth, weaving, diverging, intertwining. I think of those four walls that meant so little and so much. There, not there.
Though I’ll never hear from you, my friend, tell me of the open-air cook shops, of the Monastery of the Azure Clouds, its temple with 3,200 small gilt images inside. Tell me of the old men kneading brass balls in their hands, of paper lanterns, and of the houses of the poor where there are no lanterns, only wicks floating in bowls of dirty oil.
The Mass of Separation decreed a leper must have “a hood and cloak, his own plain shoes, and clappers.” He should have “two pairs of sheets, a cup, a funnel, a small knife and plate” He should “never go through a narrow lane lest he might meet someone.”
Though I carry no clapper or bell I often hear one as I walk. I feel the rough hood on my forehead, the weight of the cloak on my shoulder-bones, my arms. The garden path’s very still in this sunlight. Not one petal has fallen onto it today. Not one leaf.
I think of you with affection—
Your Friend,
… If I had a wooden clapper, a hood …
Iron Threshold Steamed-Bread Luminous Clouds
Temple Convent Studio
Pear Fragrance Court Wasp-Waist Bridge
PRESCRIPTION (from chapter 10)
Ginseng .2 oz
Atractylis (clay baked) .2 oz
Pachyma cocos .3 oz
Prepared Ti root .4 oz
Aralia edulis (cooked in wine) .2 oz
White peony (cooked) .2 oz
Szechuan selenium .15 oz
Sophora tomentosa .3 oz
Cyperus rotundus .2 oz
Gentian soaked in vinegar .08 oz
Dioscorea from the Huai region (cooked) .2 oz
Genuine Tung-ngo glue (prepared with powdered oyster shell) .2 oz
Corydalis ambigua (cooked in wine) .15 oz
Dried licorice .08 oz
Take with seven Fujian lotus seeds with
the pits extracted, and two large red dates
Clerval puts down his pen but leaves the paper on the table. Corydalis ambigua. I wonder what that is, the shape and color of its root, its stem?— ambiguity built into its very core.
“Admitting more than one interpretation or explanation,” my dictionary says of ambiguity, and “of double or several possible meanings.” “Of dubious classification or position.” Isn’t that like me?
It also means “being on the boundary line.” I remember Claire asking w
hat liberty is. She didn’t want to be ruled by boundaries, didn’t want to be ashamed of her own mind.
And there’s: “wavering, uncertain in tendency or direction.” As your face remains uncertain to me—an underwater face—drifting, mysterious, undisclosed.
________village
My Friend,
Laurie Sheck Page 17