‘Where do you want to go?’
I tell him: I need to go to the old part of town, to the souq, and to see how the Chinese town intersects with Kashgar Old Town.
He gestures me towards his car, and I follow him. Once I am settled in the back seat, he speaks: ‘It is not safe for you here. Why are you here?’
‘Research. I am from England, a writer.’
He lights a cigarette, looks crossly at me in the mirror. I find his crossness reassuring and decide to interpret it as a sign that he is not going to kill or kidnap me. As I think this I blush, horrified to realise that, in my mind, I am as orientalist as my missionaries.
‘Can we at least drive around so I can see the town? I’ve come such a long way.’
We move off and I want to ask his name but feel shy about it. The adobe walls of old Kashgar rise up, pink-dusted and ancient, with the Chinese town on one side, Uighur on the other. We are driving slowly along the road that divides them.
‘What’s happening?’
‘Han men got into a fight with Uighurs in a restaurant, now there is a lot of trouble. They have been killing. Uighurs are very angry, the Han police are very, very bad.’
‘Will there be more trouble?’
‘Yes.’
Before coming I had read that Beijing officials are in the process of demolishing Kashgar’s Old Town. Historic blacksmith stalls, copper shops, ancient butchers, tailors and pot-makers have been destroyed and many families relocated against their will. Beijing declares the winding streets dangerous and unhygienic. Uighur leaders think the policy has more to do with ethnic control and fear that the Sunni Muslim Uighurs might behave in ways similar to comrades over the borders in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Tibet.
We drive in silence. I stare out at the streets, watching the stalls and mopeds, bicycles and groups of men blur past. I appreciate that it is brave of him to tell me anything at all. From the tantalising glimpses of labyrinthine roads I realise that there is only so much I can see from the car.
‘I need to walk into the souq.’
He shakes his head. In his mid-twenties, with a neat moustache and an air of worry about him, he clearly does not approve of my plan. I know very well what the shake of his head means: that I don’t belong here, don’t understand and that I should go. Despite, or because of this, I ask him, ‘I need to go into the desert. Can you help?’
‘What?’
‘Not far, just enough to get a feel, a sense, to take photographs.’
He is squinting at me in the mirror, no doubt trying to work out if I am a journalist, a spy, or just an idiot. I don’t have to try hard to look like the last. I think he is going to refuse but he nods; we make arrangements for payment and to meet in the lobby in the morning. His card has no name, just the word TAXI and a number.
. . . . . . . . . . .
My husband calls at 4am. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Well, I’m in this hotel room alone, there are police everywhere, a driver told me that there are likely to be violent —’
The phone goes dead, a clicking noise. I have been monitored, followed and bugged in China before, when I had spent a month with a film crew travelling around six cities. I know these things happen here, but at this moment I very much want to talk to my husband. I swear.
An hour later he manages to get through again. ‘I think we are being listened to,’ I say. ‘Don’t mention anything that is happening here or we’ll be cut off.’
‘OK.’
‘How is Woody?’
‘He misses you, but we’re fine. What have you seen?’
‘I went to the souq during the hottest part of the day. Children with shaved heads. Racks of mutton. There are birdcages everywhere but they all seem to be empty.’
‘Stay safe,’ he says.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I didn’t think it could be possible to travel further from my son but the drive into the desert is an unreal slide into another life. I eat my hotel-supplied sandwich, drink warm bottled water and watch the dusty streets of Kashgar fade into an endless, brown scrubland. A nothing landscape. I see the poplar trees described by Mildred Cable and remember a section from her journal: The land introduces one but gradually to its desert terrors. Otherwise one might not be able to bear them. You have had your first taste of the desolating wilderness.
After driving for several hours the heat is unbearable, my water almost gone and I am grateful when the driver turns off the main road into a smaller track. We approach a village, and pull up outside a teahouse in the central square. He is welcomed by an older man who obviously knows him well and we are shown to a table and brought tea, then shortly afterwards mutton kebabs and thick noodles.
The men talk, swirl tea in their cups, then fling it mysteriously onto the floor. They are not unfriendly; I seem to be accepted, and it is pleasant to sit in the shade and watch the village world go about its business.
He is patient with me as I photograph trees, stones, doors, windows, bicycles, shop-signs and a grey-barked shrub that grows everywhere. I look up and see my son’s face in the strange clouds that hang low, not like city-clouds. The sky is too wide. I click the camera again and again to ignore the ache that has come, a pull to return to my son that is stronger and brighter than the desert-light.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Three or four men are shaking hands and talking outside a doorway. A woman, wrapped in a colourful abaya, carries a large plate of meat and disappears into the house. There is laughter. One of the men summons us over and talks to the driver, smiling at me.
‘Would you like to go in? He is inviting you in.’
I am taken through the doorway into a heavily decorated room that has bright blue walls and colourful rugs and cushions on the floor. Two men stop talking to look at me. A teenage girl, hovering behind them, gestures to us and we follow her, further into the house, to a larger room that overlooks a small courtyard space. Here there are more women who also stop talking to stare at me. I am given a chair, offered a small glass of tea. The driver stands near me, accepts tea too. It is claustrophobic; they all talk at once. I guess it is a celebration of something.
The teenage girl beckons us again and we follow her, this time across the courtyard where there are rolls of carpet and sacks of rice against the wall and children playing.
We are taken into another, much darker room. Here is an elderly woman sitting on a stool. On a blanket across her knee a naked baby lies on its belly. Next to her on the floor a young woman sits cross-legged, holding a blue bowl. They both look at me momentarily and then the ancient old lady goes on with her work: rubbing the baby, massaging it, squeezing its little legs. Unlike the newborn babies I have seen and held – purple-faced and crying – it is relaxed, floppy like a doll.
I sit on a low stool to watch. A baby was not what I was expecting to see. The woman hands a blue pot to the old lady and she takes a handful of fine white powder. She then sprinkles it onto the baby’s back and rubs some more.
‘What is she doing?’ I whisper. He is thinking of the English word, and then says: ‘Salt.’
I wonder if the old lady is blind, or didn’t really see me, but then she suddenly speaks. My driver translates. ‘She asks who you are. Where you come from?’ I tell her.
‘Can you give her my congratulations for the new baby?’ He does.
‘Will you tell her I have a son too?’ She looks up at me. She has no teeth. She is spectacularly old, like a tree that has grown forever out of this dust. I think she is going to smile at me but she does not.
‘Did you salt him?’ he translates.
‘No. No. We don’t … I did not.’
I recall, then, a description in Mildred Cable’s book of the salting of a baby, quoting the Book of Ezekiel and a terrible insult: You were not salted at all nor were you swaddled. Meaning: You invited trouble.
Salt keeps demons away.
The old lady picks up a long strip of fabric and proceeds to delicately
wrap it around the baby, tight. The baby is completely mummified, but seems content as the younger woman takes it away, presumably back to the mother.
There is a noise in the other room, a kerfuffle. The driver is tense. I stand up and he propels me back through the rooms. The glass is taken from my hand.
In the street a police car is waiting with three Chinese policemen standing next to it. They point at me and come towards us.
‘What are they saying?’
One of the policemen waves me towards his car.
‘No,’ I say to the driver, touching his arm. ‘I don’t want to go with them. Can you drive me back?’
He speaks to them, but they are angry and begin to shout, close to his face. The men of the village stand watching and women peep around doors. One of the Chinese policemen pushes the driver roughly, and then screams at his face. It seems unnecessary and suddenly I feel fury. What are they doing? And why is this government demolishing an ancient 500-year-old city? Why not allow Uighur children to learn to read and write their own language? I want to shout at them, but when I see the driver dejected, not fighting back, I realise that I have brought him great trouble.
I try to talk to them, ‘He hasn’t done anything wrong.’ But I’m speaking in English. They just look blankly at me, then wave me towards the car.
‘Go home and be safe,’ the driver says, just as he’s been saying to me all along.
‘I’m sorry.’
I don’t know if he hears me because two of the policemen have pulled him to the side of the road and they are handcuffing him. I am steered forcefully by the other one to the police car. The door is opened and I climb in. He speaks into his radio.
The village people are staring and I know what they are thinking: that I am an unlucky visitor with my red hair and red skin. A second policeman gets into the car with us. I look back through the rectangle of the car window at my driver’s lowered head and black hair, the remaining policeman talking roughly at him; I have added, immeasurably, to his difficulties.
The people watch and I know, now, that I cannot do this again. I can’t go this far across the world, such a distance away from my unsalted son. That traveller who was at her happiest when leaving has dissolved, like bird bones left in the desert sun.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Waiting outside my room is an unsmiling, extremely smart Chinese man with a plane ticket in his hand. My bag is packed, at his feet. He speaks excellent English. I am to leave for the airport immediately, ‘For my own safety.’
‘I would just like to check I’ve got everything.’ He nods. The bed is made and the towels straightened as if no guest has stayed here and I already know that the card with TAXI and a number on it is no longer next to the bedside lamp. He makes hurrying noises.
It is business class as far as Urumqi, and then – a nice touch – I’m bumped down to economy. I text a journalist acquaintance in Beijing.
‘You’re where? You’re where?’ He gives me his address. ‘That’s fine, you must come and stay.’
In Bear Trap Canyon
BY PETER MATTHIESSEN
Peter Matthiessen has written eight novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord (nominated for the National Book Award) and Far Tortuga, and also a book of short stories, On the River Styx. His parallel career as a naturalist and environmental activist has produced numerous acclaimed works of nonfiction, most of them serialised in the New Yorker; these include The Tree Where Man Was Born (another National Book Award nominee) and The Snow Leopard (a National Book Award winner). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974.
The road to Ennis, crossing the Gallatin River west of Bozeman, arrives at the Madison not far below where this renowned fishing river springs free from the mountains at the bottom end of an eight-mile chute called Bear Trap Canyon. ‘Once you head down into the Bear Trap, you are fatally committed,’ said my fishing partner, writer-editor Stephen Byers, as its mouth came into view. ‘Those canyon walls are 1500 to 2000 feet high, and even where you can climb out, it’s roadless wilderness.’ Byers, a husky, bearded man who lived in Ennis for some years back in the ’70s and ’80s and has fished most of the rivers in this watershed, described with awe the three large rapids way back up that canyon, in particular the notorious ‘Kitchen Sink’ – so-called, he thought, because it sucked everything down or perhaps because its erratic torrent of white leaping waves and sudden waterfalls, boiling eddies and treacherous boulders contained ‘everything but’ in the way of dangerous obstacles to forward progress.
Byers himself, as a young man, had tried that rapid twice, coming to grief both times on the first hazard, a gigantic boulder like a barrier that lies athwart the head of the long rapid. In a matter of moments, he had broken off both oars (‘Well, only one oar on the second try,’ he grinned) and been jolted overboard. ‘I was terrified,’ he said. ‘My hard boat had no give to it, unlike these flexible canvas rafts they’re using now. There’s been plenty of lives lost in that canyon, I know that much, and Eric has bombed out in there a few times, too.’
Eric Shores was our very tall, loose, lanky friend, in big broad sun hat and cowl neckerchief, who with his partner, Annie, inhabited an odd studio-type house on a high treeless bluff with a fine view of Ennis Lake, which nestles like a blue glacier in its mountain basin. Backed up behind the Madison Dam near the top of Bear Trap Canyon, the shallow lake, perhaps 2.5 miles across, extends to the broad marshes to the east where the Madison enters the lake after a smooth 60-mile descent from the Yellowstone Plateau. In other years, Byers and I, separately and together, had drifted and fished the last few miles of the upper river and its channels through those marshes, and had walked the banks and waded bars and cast to rises of the big resident rainbows and browns that lurk in the labyrinths of weeds on the shallow bottom.
We would fish those places, too, said Eric, who had signed on as our guide for this trip, but this year he wanted us to try the Bear Trap, which was nearly pristine, being very little fished. Byers and I raised eyebrows, grinning – What? Not fished? How can that be? – and Shores grinned, too. Even the dean of local guides, their old friend Randy Brown, whose raft had overturned in the Kitchen Sink on his first time through, had never gone near the place again. (‘A boat-eatin’ bugger,’ the rapid had been called by retired guide Johnny France, remembering the deaths of seven people in that canyon.) Not being licensed to guide clients through the Bear Trap, Eric had generously offered to give up a day in his high season as a guide and take us in there on a friendship basis and do some fishing, too.
And the Kitchen Sink? Our friend smiled vaguely: he recalled no fatalities among his passengers, not to date. Anyway, there was a portage path along the cliffside and down around that rapid, so nobody had to risk it but the boatman. And so, on a bright cold morning, we trailered Eric’s 15-foot blue ‘raft’ from his house on the bluff along the shore to the point where the lake flees the sun and, gathering speed as the cliffs rise, is once again a river, curling down past its 35-foot dam into the cold shade of the gorge at over 2000 cubic feet per second, in a torrent strong enough to roll big boulders.
We launched the raft in the first eddy below the powerhouse. For the next hour, perhaps two, we all caught and released fish in the beautiful long pools below the cliffs, casting behind the immense boulders where trout shelter from the current. Steve’s wife, Heather Kilpatrick, a retired attorney who does not fish but enjoys the quiet under the river roar in this majestic gorge, sat straight upright on a narrow board all morning with no backrest, mostly silent and entirely uncomplaining. She maintained this composure even when, perhaps two miles downstream from the put-in, we sailed into the Whitehorse, the first of three challenging passages in this four-mile stretch of canyon, where our husky canvas craft with its long oars, precisely maneuvered, banked, and spun by broad-shouldered, long-armed Eric, negotiated the waves, boils, swirls, and bangs of this Class III rapid without bad scares or undue technical difficulty.
At the last large pool above this second rapid, Eric pulled over to the bank. Because the morning had been chilly in the deep shadows of the canyon, we were happy to disembark and stretch our backs a little in the sun. Here Eric pointed out the path that climbs the steep north slope to a point high above the torrent and descends again to the first pool, beyond where he would pick us up.
No doubt intoxicated by the mountain air or over-excited by the roar of the white water, perhaps still celebrating the 23-inch rainbow – my largest ever – caught the day before in the Fletcher Channel on the far side of the lake, or perhaps – well, what? It doesn’t really matter. With incredulity, I heard my voice tell Eric that if it was okay with him, I’d like to go. He looked at me a bit quizzically. I nodded. It’s true, man; I’d like to run this rapid. And he nodded, too, as if considering the idea. Doubtless he would have much preferred to skid his lightened raft up waves and down around the pouring boulders, free of all responsibility for others, not to mention liability in case of accident for passengers who were only cargo with no way to help, a hindrance at best and at worst – should they panic or be thrown overboard – a damned nuisance, endangering everybody.
Better Than Fiction Page 11