The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  It’s the beginning of April and I have gotten into an easy Monday-through-Friday routine. I lead one to three tour groups in the morning, grab a quick lunch, then return for my next round of tours. One day the more rotund and cheerful of the monks, Tenzin Y., asks if I want to join them in the cafeteria. At lunch, he orders the special of the day—roast turkey, mashed potatoes, salad, and soup.

  “You guys eat meat?”

  “Of course we do.”

  “I thought there was some kind of rule or something.”

  “Everything is good. Especially cake.”

  We find a table and sit down. I look across at the other monk’s plate, a small dish of macaroni and vegetables. Both monks bow before they eat. I am growing fond of these two men. Despite their robes and rituals, they are anything but off-putting or annoyingly pious.

  “Anyone can learn to watch his or her mind,” says Tenzin Y. “Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, anyone. To pay attention to how one creates one’s own suffering, that is the point. To end the suffering of others—even more important.”

  Tenzin G. is quiet during lunch. When he finishes, he gets up quietly, bows, and goes back to work. After he leaves, I ask Tenzin Y. about what he hopes the impact of the mandala will be on the community.

  “The Kalachakra plants a seed of motivation in the mind of those who see it. The most important part of creating a mandala is the motivation behind it. Motivation eventually leads to compassion.”

  I want to ask him about my mother. What about her suffering, the suffering of the mentally ill? How can I help her if I am too afraid to see her face-to-face? Instead, I ask him if he was born in Tibet.

  “No,” he says. “Dharamsala, where His Holiness lives.”

  “What about Tenzin G.?”

  “He came over the mountains.”

  “The Himalayas?”

  “Yes. He came as a child to India, after China invaded Tibet.”

  “Like the Dalai Lama.”

  “Yes,” says Tenzin Y. “And many small children. They still cross that way by foot.”

  “And Tenzin G.—did he cross over the mountains on foot?”

  Tenzin Y. nods, his smile gone. “It was a very long and difficult journey.”

  In my mother’s April journal, she writes:

  The poet said April is the cruelest month. It seems so. I am trying to think constructively about cooking again. I learned how to cook at the Recovery Center before Reagan closed everything down for the poor. I would like to make a dish called Turley Tava. I’ve never prepared it, but will. Maybe it’s something like Hungarian goulash only it goes inside the stove: very small of quantity lamb, eggplant, fresh tomatoes, onions, yellow string beans and white potatoes. Stuffed peppers are good to make too. And meatless casseroles—tuna, mushroom, pasta. And salmon cakes. I would make those too if I had a home. I have always been partial to salmon cakes.

  At my sister’s, the three of us take turns cooking. It’s quiet and relaxing to dine with them after being with the public all day. But sometimes I wonder if my mother digs in garbage bins for food. Has her life gotten so low? I worry about whether or not she has enough to eat, if she has shelter. I know I won’t mention my concerns to Natalia. What can she do? What can either of us do? In the evenings, Natalia, her husband, Kerry, and I watch a movie or read in the sitting room. There are so many rooms in their house—five rooms upstairs, five rooms below. I wander through the house, not sure where to sit. Where does my mother sit—on a park bench? On the cold hard ground?

  One day, a group from a local women’s shelter appears at the gallery. The women range in age from nineteen to seventy-three. The oldest is the same age as my mother.

  “I’ve never been in here before,” says a middle-aged woman with blond curly hair, arms crossed in front. “It’s not my kind of thing.”

  The women hang up their coats and congregate in the hallway. “Are we allowed to smoke?” asks the seventy-three-year-old. “Anyone got a cigarette?”

  “Just look around,” I say, “then we’ll talk in a few minutes about what’s on display.”

  “This is a waste of my fucking time,” says a young woman with short-cropped hair, tattoos up and down her arms. A couple women snicker.

  “Walk around a bit. If you don’t like anything, you don’t have to stay after that.”

  These women didn’t choose to come here; they’re only here because some social worker cajoled them into coming. What do I have to offer them? And the older woman—is that how my mother looks now, stooped shoulders, favoring one leg, sitting down every few minutes because her emphysema makes it hard for her to breathe?

  “I want a cigarette. Where the hell can I smoke?” she says again.

  “You got coffee here? I’d like a cup of hot coffee,” says another, whose left hand and wrist are bandaged. Did her husband do that? Did she try to kill herself? These women don’t need me, they need money and a place to live.

  “Let me show you something,” I say.

  I take them into a room filled with ritual objects and thangka paintings, painted scrolls traditionally used for meditation and healing. They walk around awhile, then meet me by the altar the monks have set up. I explain to them the story of Buddha, who was called Siddhartha before his enlightenment, and how, after a cloistered life of luxury, he stepped outside his palace one day and saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a starving man who had rejected the material world. I tell them how Siddhartha was so struck with all the pain and misery he saw that he renounced his riches and set out to find a cure for human suffering.

  “He left all that money?” asks the youngest, a girl with long dark brown braids. She could be me at twenty-two. “He gave up all those jewels? What a dumb-ass!” Everyone laughs. “So what happened next?”

  “For years he wandered. First he denied himself everything, like that starving man he met his first day out in the world. Then, later, he wasn’t so hard on himself. He found a middle path between poverty and the life he had led before.” I tell the women about Siddhartha sitting under the Bodhi Tree and meditating until he found the root of all suffering.

  “What’d he find?” asks Nancy, a woman about my age, pushing forty.

  I try to explain meditation to the women. I tell them how it might help them to just sit sometimes, be still and watch their breath. I tell them, “It helps calm down the gerbil living inside your brain.”

  We go into the main exhibition room and I introduce the women to the monks. The women seem intimidated, for some reason, and don’t ask questions. They watch the two Tenzins for a while, but aren’t that interested in the mandala. Most want to see the photographs they passed by when they first came in, so we return to the main hall. The pictures are from a contemporary series called “Tibetans in Exile.” I ask each of them to pick out a photo and tell the group what she thinks is going on. Nancy selects a portrait of an elderly monk holding several implements of torture. He stole them from his captors when he was being held and tortured by Chinese guards.

  “Why did you pick that one?” I ask.

  “The label said he was beat with those things,” she says. “Just look at his face. You can tell it really happened. It’s in his eyes.”

  Another woman picks a photo of three little boys in Dharamsala, India. The caption below says that the children crossed over the mountains all the way to India by foot.

  “I got three kids,” the woman says. Pat is her name. “I took them with me when I left.”

  I tell the women how many children make the journey over the Himalayas alone. I show them photographs of the mountains and explain how treacherous they are, especially in winter.

  “Their mothers let them go alone like that?” asks Pat.

  “Their parents might be in prison for speaking out against the government,” I say. “Or they might have gotten killed. Some of the children lose fingers and toes from frostbite. But many of them make it to safety. I don’t know how but they do.”

  I start t
o ask the women what I ask every group I take through this exhibit, even children: “If you had to leave your home in a hurry, what would you take with you?” and then I realize, for these women, the question isn’t hypothetical at all. They tell me they grabbed their children first, what money they had, and that’s about it.

  “I wore the clothes on my back,” says the seventy-three-year-old. She still won’t give her name. “Didn’t take a thing,” she says. “My husband had a gun.”

  I scooped up photographs of strangers and a piece of rosin. Natalia grabbed my mother’s address book so she couldn’t find the phone numbers of Natalia’s friends. My mother will obsess about her missing book for years. Do you know where my address book is? She will ask in her letters. I have lost the addresses and numbers of all my friends and loved ones. Some had unpublished numbers. How will I ever find them?

  I’ve kept the women way past my usual hour-long tour. My mother could be in this group. She’d be outside right now, agitated, puffing on a cigarette. “It’s time to go,” I say. “But come back anytime. Just look for me. The show will be up for a while.”

  They gather their coats and I tell them where they can get coffee and a snack, where to buy cigarettes nearby. One woman is missing, though, a quiet one in her late twenties, with wavy light brown hair and a bright pink hoodie. I retrace our steps. The mandala room is empty now except for the Tenzins, working steadily in the center of the room. I return to the room with the altar. The missing woman is standing in front of a thangka of Green Tara, one of the divine bodhisattvas, a female Buddha in the making. The woman spins around and gasps when she hears me enter. PTSD, most likely. I would have done the same.

  “Who is she?” she asks.

  “Her name is Tara. She’s a goddess.”

  “Awesome. I got a friend named Tara.”

  “Her name means ‘to cross over,’ like you cross a bridge over a stream. She helps people cross over difficult places. They call her the Swift Liberator sometimes because she stands for freedom from pain and suffering.”

  “I like her. I wish I could take her home.”

  “She’s a kind of mother figure because she’s so compassionate. There’s a story about how she was born from a tear falling from Buddha’s eye. Some people meditate on her image to help them overcome fear.”

  “Do you do that?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Listen, the gallery’s closing but you can come back another time. I can tell you more about her then.”

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “See you again maybe.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. ’Bye.”

  Before I leave for the day, I stop to look in on the monks. I pause in front of a grainy 1959 black-and-white photo of a young Dalai Lama in disguise on horseback, fleeing his homeland. He looks vulnerable in the picture, so small on his horse in the immense Tibetan landscape at dusk. When the Dalai Lama left the Potala Palace in the night as the Chinese were advancing, he said to his companions, “I see a safe journey. I see a safe return.” I wonder if the woman in the pink hoodie will come back. I wonder if I will return as well, to the place of my origin, to the mother I left behind.

  It is almost mid-April and the monks are close to completion. From the side, looking at it at eye-level, the mandala resembles a giant cake. It’s hard to believe that soon the monks will sweep it all away—the colorful rooms and animals, the protective rings of fire and water, the secret Sanskrit prayers. I feel sad about leaving and saying goodbye to the monks, especially Tenzin Y. When I’m around them, I feel more at ease in the present moment, more accepting of the fact that I don’t know what to do about my mother today. I also feel, when I’m with them, that I have the potential to do something compassionate and brave. But what that is, I don’t know. Will I feel the same when I return?

  After the Tenzins leave for the day, I climb a ladder a workman had forgotten to put away. From above, the mandala is a perfect architectural plan and easy to imagine as a five-story palace. There are circles within circles, each one a mandala, each mandala surrounded by a square representing a palace room. In my mind, I enter one of the doors at the first level, the mandala of the body, and walk through transparent walls. I climb up glistening steps to the second level, the mandala of speech, surrounded by five multicolored walls. Up another set of steps and I’m at the third level of the mind, encircled by three more walls. Farther in, on the fourth level, is the room of consciousness. Is this a map of the human brain? Everything here is ordered, like a Bach cantata, a nautilis shell, the petals of a rose. On this platform is yet another room—the center where the monks first began, the mandala of enlightenment—happiness, freedom from suffering, compassion, freedom from pain. They say that Kalachakra resides here, upon an eight-petaled lotus. I peer down into the mandala of enlightenment; it is the smallest one of all. Is there something in that tiny room for me, for my mother, or is it just another beautiful thing to be swept away?

  Close to the outer rings, I see a tiny smudge. I climb down a couple rungs. An insect has died in the sand, perhaps a fly, but I can’t tell. I climb down another step. It is a fly embedded in a secret Sanskrit word. Will they leave it there or try to pick it out? Even in this realm of ordered beauty there is something a little off, a fact I somehow find comforting.

  The friend who manages my post office box in New York forwards a letter to me from my mother one day. Dear Myra, she writes, I hope you know that you are the only friend I have in the world, and that I don’t know where I’ll be in the near future but I’m sure to be alone. She says she has decided to let me have her address and hopes I will do the same. She wants to see me quite badly. She tells me she hasn’t been that well and is living in subsidized housing for “women in transition” in Cleveland. You can call me in the evening on the public phone, after five. I look forward to your call.

  I decide to decide later about what to do, after I return to Massachusetts. Maybe I’ll write the director of the place. Or should I call? Do I have the courage? She doesn’t have to know I called. Maybe she has a social worker now, someone who can help. It’s possible that social services in Cleveland have improved since 1990. There is always a sliver of hope in me, the hope that I can still save her and see her again.

  The monks have finally finished. Everyone from the school and surrounding community is invited to the closing ceremony. We place flowers and little bowls of water on altars at each cardinal direction of Kalachakra. The two Tenzins circle the palace and chant, turning the ritual bell and varja in their hands.

  Dozens of people pour into the gallery. I recognize two women from the shelter but the one I talked to about Green Tara is not in the crowd. The Tenzins invite a couple of us up so they can give us gifts. Tenzin Y. places a white khatag around my neck and bows. He calls me Mira-la, adding an honorific ending to my name. It sounds like what my grandma used to call me in Hebrew when I was young—Miraleh.

  The monks pinch special places in the sand. Then, with steady hands, they guide the varjas and mark lines through the palace, dragging them to the outer edges of the design. They sweep the sand to the center, the place where they began, and then, when all of the rooms and deities and elephants and flowers, jewels, horses, shells, waves, wheels, words, and protective flames have dissolved into a pile of colored dust (including the little dead fly), the two monks scoop the pile up and pour it into an urn. With all the colors blended now, the sand resembles the gray ashes of someone’s cremated remains.

  We head to the river, a hundred people or more. It’s a quiet but joyous procession through Canton. We pass beneath the movie theater’s marquee, which advertises the film Life Is Beautiful, and walk in the spring air to the banks of the Grasse River. We sit in silence while the two monks enter the river and wade up to their knees. They chant for several minutes then tip over the run. We watch as the water takes the fallen palace and carries it away.

  The next day, I stop by the gallery. The blue platform still bears faint traces of chalk; soon that too will
be washed away. Tenzin Y. is gathering his tools.

  “Tenzin-la, I was just wondering—why toss the sand in the river? Why not over a hill, or bury it in the ground?”

  “Oh, that is easy,” he says. “We sprinkle colors on the water because it delights the magical beings who live below.”

  “Magical beings?”

  “The colors make them happy.”

  A group of professors and gallery staff arrive to say goodbye. I want to ask Tenzin about these water creatures—if this is something he really believes in or if it is a myth. I want to ask him what he thinks I should do about my mother, now that I know where she is.

  “Tenzin-la...”

  “You have another question for me.”

  “Yes... I mean, no—not really, I guess. I just hope we see each other again.”

  “Don’t worry, Mira-la. I see a safe journey. Tujechhe.”

  “Tujechhe, Tenzin-la. Goodbye.”

  When I get back to Massachusetts, a letter is sitting in my post office box:

  Dear Daughter,

  I’m still waiting for your call. I don’t know how much longer I’ll stay here and I want to ask you a favor. There’s an art show at Cleveland State University. I never submitted anything before. I brought in a large picture called “Going Places” and a small one of a girl named Nancy who comes in here to cook. They accepted them both. I went to your big art exhibit in Chicago once. Can you come to mine? I wonder if you are receiving my mail or if you are in some kind of detention. I need to see you even if it is a screen appearance. Lately I’ve been through hell. Your old picture, “Selective Forgetfulness,” is still missing and many other things from the house. What other dirty tricks will be played on me this day?