Without knowing why, without being able to explain her action, Mrs. Pollifax moved softly toward him until, some ten paces behind and to one side of him she too sat down, crossed her legs under her and closed her eyes... and almost at once, seated there, she became aware—and knew —that she truly did sit in the presence of a holy man because she had never before felt so at peace, or felt such love and serenity flowing into her from him. Time stood still again as she moved without thought through depths she'd never experienced before.
It ended only when her left foot protested against the weight of her right leg, for the lotus position was still unmanageable for her. The pain of it returned her to the moment, and opening her eyes she looked again at the Acharya's profile silhouetted against the trees beyond the parapet: he sat undisturbed. Glancing at her watch, she saw that an hour had passed, she had sat for that long a time. Silently she rose and left, and returning to her mat on the floor, she lay down and slept deeply and restfully, utterly relaxed and without worry, until the sun reached her face.
Opening her eyes, she saw Bonchoo leaning over Mornajay.
"Koon Emily—Mrs. Emily," he said in a whisper, "he sleeps, the fever has gone."
"Yes," she said drowsily, and sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Can you speak to the holy man now about finding the Shan camp, Bonchoo? We could get started soon, we must be very near it."
Bonchoo nodded. "I could, yes, I am more hopeful. He has had the namjai to feed and shelter us, he may have the namjai to help us."
"What does namjai mean?"
He grinned. 'To turn into English would be 'water of the heart.'" He rolled up his mat, placed it in a corner and vanished down the corridor.
Oh, for a toothbrush, lamented Mrs. Pollifax. She reached into her purse for a comb and was about to begin her morning ablutions when she saw that Mornajay's eyes were open. "Good morning," she said, and went to him.
Mornajay stared at her, ran a tongue over his lips and tried to speak. His voice was a whisper. "Thank you."
She nodded. "You're a very lucky man, Mr. Mornajay, but I'm not the one to thank."
His eyes moved to the thatched roof and he frowned. "Where am I? What has happened?"
"Well, I think you've found your lost monastery," she told him with a smile.
"My what?"
"Your lost monastery. You said you were looking for a lost monastery."
"I was?" He looked puzzled. "How did I get here?"
"Better you sleep," she told him, patting his arm. "Just sleep and get well, there's time later to—"
'Time!" His eyes opened wide and he struggled to sit up, stirred by some inexplicable urgency. "What day? What date is this? Please—important!"
"Let me think a minute," she said. "Yes, this would have to be Saturday morning, which makes it the nineteenth of January."
"Good—all right, then. Yes—sleep. Get strong." He smiled faintly. "Never so weak before. Dysentery? Malaria? Typhoid?"
She laughed. "I don't think you'd believe me if 1 told you, Mr. Mornajay. Just sleep and be glad."
"Glad," he murmured and closed his eyes. "Yes, glad," he repeated and fell asleep.
She came closest to liking him at this moment. He was not an easy man to like, she thought: stiff, cold, estranged, concealing every hint of the vulnerability that she was seeing now. She thought he would be a happier and better person if he acknowledged his humanness instead of keeping it sealed up inside of him. On the other hand, she thought, one could never know the traumas that shaped such people; everyone carried around with them their own particular defenses, antagonisms, secrets and uncertainties, and if Mornajay seemed to carry an unusually heavy load of them he at least, she thought with humor, wore beautiful clothes, and very expensive ones.
She left Mornajay to search for food. They had slept late, it was nearly nine o'clock, and she supposed that in a temple or monastery this was very late indeed; the Acharya had no doubt been up since dawn, or perhaps had not slept at all. She found the kitchen, or what she assumed to be the kitchen because the room held a circle of bricks on the stone floor, with the embers of a fire still glowing, and a large lacquered bowl with rice soaking in it. Two kettles hung neatly from a peg on the wall; there was a shelf with eight carved wooden bowls on it, and eight empty mason jars. In a corner stood a small pile of kindling for the fire, and above it a finger of bananas hanging from a nail. She removed one and hungrily ate it standing there.
Finding no one at all, not even Bonchoo, she returned to the parapet and descended the lion-guarded staircase to the garden, following a path that led to a stand of trees in the rear. A well stood here in the shade, efficiently made of cement, with a primitive pump and an intricate series of bamboo pipes to carry water into the nether regions of the monastery. A cluster of unused bamboo pipes lay about like jackstraws, and seeing the ditches that threaded the bare garden, she realized that in the planting season those pipes would be attached to the well and would feed water to the garden, irrigating the rice and vegetables.
As she neared the well she saw Bonchoo sitting on its step, looking gloomy.
"Bonchoo!" she called.
He made room for her and she sat down beside him. "Did you find the Acharya?"
He pointed to three saffron robes hanging from the branch of a tree. "Yes, he was doing his laundry. Now he has gone to teach boys in one of the rooms."
"And?"
He turned to her with a melancholy sigh. "He will meditate on it; he says he cannot encourage anger against the Shans, he does not—without meditating on it, you understand—feel he can show us where they may be."
"And when is he going to meditate on it?" she demanded. "You said he'd gone off to teach?
Bonchoo nodded.
"This shocks me," she said quietly. "I don't understand it when he was kind enough to help Mornajay."
Bonchoo lifted his hat, rubbed his head, sighed and placed his hat more squarely on his head. "He says he lives here in peace and harmony with the mountain people. He teaches reading to the young men who come here, he serves the Thai people who find their way here, he feeds the bandits and gives shelter to the insurgents, and benediction to smugglers as well as to soldiers who pass by. He does not judge because every man has the Buddha nature."
She said hotly, "That's all very well, but did you explain that those neighbors of his with the Buddha nature have kidnapped my husband and may very well kill him, and that two of them have tried to kill you?"
He turned and looked at her. He said gravely, "It is most difficult. We bring him a man poisoned by an arrow, we ask help, he knows nothing of us except that we bring violence with us. We must wait. He is a holy man, Koon Emily. He will meditate on it; if it is his karma to help, he will help."
"How will he know?" she said bitterly.
"He will know." Frowning over this, Bonchoo said earnestly, "Even I can see—if he takes us to a secret camp something changes here. He must be a man trusted with many secrets. I can be sad, but do not despair, Mrs. Emily. If the Acharya refuses us we can still set out alone, the two of us. Anu said south—"
"Could one of the young monks be persuaded to guide us?"
"Only if he asked them to," Bonchoo said sorrowfully.
"And would it be dangerous, just the two of us?"
He said dryly, "Only if we cannot find the trail, or the way back if we become lost."
She nodded and rose. "I will speak to the holy man myself. You said he spoke some English?"
"Quite much, really."
"Oh? Where can I find him?"
Bonchoo gestured toward the building. "He went in."
She found the classroom, a long room, very dim and bare, the only points of light the brilliant sunshine framed in the squares of two windows, whose shutters had been thrown back for the light, and the brightness of the five orange robes worn by the novices. Pour of them lay on the floor turning the pages of a manuscript; the fifth sat cross-legged beside them, reciting in a sing-song voice. He glanced up at
Mrs. Pollifax and smiled. She returned his smile but left because the Acharya was not among them.
She found him at last in the kitchen, ladling out the rice that she had seen soaking on her earlier visit. He was ladling it with a spoon into a steamer made of woven bamboo. Hearing her, he turned, and for the first time she was seeing him face to face. She thought how conditioned one became to seeing hair on a person's head, and yet a shaved head certainly placed emphasis on the face, and what a striking face his was. He did not look at all Asian: French, perhaps, she thought, or—not familiar with the Burmese —he was perhaps a Burman. If he was a Thai then his blood had been well mixed with Caucasian for many generations. It was a very strong face—strong, strong, she repeated—the skin brown but whether from birth or the sun it was hard to guess. The eyes were brown, too, soft and penetrating. She wondered if he had been aware of her presence during the night when she had sat behind him in the moonlight. "Do you speak English?" she asked.
"Not lately," he said in a pleasant voice without accent, "but, yes, I know English."
And speaks it very well, she thought in surprise. Speaking slowly, she said, "My name is Emily Pollifax and I'm a tourist from the United States visiting your country. I came with my husband, and now I've lost him."
He nodded attentively.
"He was placed in a car—against his will—in Chiang Mai," she told him, watching his face to be sure that he understood. "And Bonchoo and I followed this car."
He nodded.
'Twice," she went on, indignation creeping into her voice, "twice men have tried to kill us. Once on the road and once here in the jungle. It's these men who have abducted my husband, or friends of theirs. We've been told that the Shan could be taking him to a camp nearby. We beg your help. To find the camp, to find my husband."
He said gently, "Food and shelter and healing I give freely to anyone who comes here. But to direct you to the Shan camp would betray the people I live among, it would betray their trust, especially if you wish them harm."
"I wish mem no harm," she told him, beginning to feel desperate. "What harm could Bonchoo and I bring them? I just want my husband!"
He looked puzzled. "But what do they want of Mr. Pollifax?'
"Not Pollifax," she said impatiently, "his name is Reed —Cyrus Reed—and as to what they want—" She stopped in midsentence because she saw that she had startled him.
"Cyrus Reed?" he repeated. "You say you are American?"
"Yes, from Connecticut, and for myself I say again that I wish no harm to the Shans, I just want Cyrus back." She would have said more but he held up his hand for silence, turned away from her and picked up the wooden ladle again. She stood and watched impatiently as he spooned wet rice into the steamer; her impatience began turning into anger as he added more kindling to the wood set under the wok, relighted the fire and added a pinch of salt to the rice.
When he turned back to her his face was impassive. He said in a strange, nearly sing-song voice, "I will have Prasett show you where the camp is but... when the sun is higher, after we have eaten rice."
She could scarcely believe it. She realized that she'd been holding her breath and now she expelled it in a long sigh of relief. She could have hugged him, she would at least have liked to shake his hand but he stood stiffly, very formal now, his face shuttered. She said with feeling, "Thank you, thank you very much."
He nodded and turned back to his work.
To Bonchoo she said triumphantly, her heart singing, "We leave after we've eaten rice."
* * *
Happily now she wandered, the monastery suddenly a different place, an experience that she must tell Cyrus about—she did not allow herself to think he might not be found today—and so she roamed freely from room to room, walking around the ruins, examining the irrigation system in the garden, entering the building again by a small arched doorway she'd not seen before, and finding a room that she'd not seen before.
It was a small room, and very plain: a mat for sleeping, a low table with a candle, a shelf, the roof a screen of woven bamboo through which the sun sent spangles and sequins of light. One of these spangles of light fell on a second shelf on which stood a few books and Mrs. Pollifax, deciding that this must be the Acharya's room, moved toward the books, curious as to what a holy man would read in this isolated corner of the world.
There were six books, three of them very old, their pages tied together between boards, and from the exotic loops of print she guessed they were manuscripts written in Thai, or Pali, the language of Buddhism. The fourth book's title was in French—French, she murmured, startled—and then turning to the last two books she was delighted to find that both were in English, a worn paperback of Shakespeare's Tragedies, the other a dog-eared hardcover copy of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Her hand went out to the last two and then drew back: / shouldn't be here, she thought, / shouldn't have entered this room and invaded the Acharya's privacy.
On the other hand, she thought, / did, and I'm here, and because she loved the book Kim, too, and because the copy looked the most used, most read and most loved of them all, she reached out for it and took it down from the shelf.
It was a child's edition of the book, with illustrations by a long-ago artist familiar to her from her own childhood; she had never seen an illustrated copy before and she turned the pages, smiling, until she reached the frontispiece on which an inscription had been printed. In a child's block letters she read:
CHAPTER
14
DOWN THE DARK STONE CORRIDOR SHE FLED, returning the way she had come, and breaking into a run when she saw the arched doorway ahead. Outside in the bright sun she sat down in the shade of the well and caught her breath. She told herself that the inscription in the book was meaningless, that John Lloyd Matthews had spent years—decades—in Thailand before he disappeared, and that once he'd been declared legally dead it was only natural that some of his possessions had remained in the country to make their way into the marketplace and be sold to strangers.
A man like the Acharya would certainly appreciate a used copy of Kim, found in a bookstall or bazaar. The book had not had to travel far, after all, because John Lloyd Matthews had disappeared in Chiang Mai.
He had been Cyrus's friend, she remembered, and he had been abducted, too, or so they believed, and she could certainly see now how easily it could be done.
She thought, Perhaps Matthews was reading the book when he was abducted, and his murderers brought it into the mountains and someone left it with the Acharya. Or perhaps...
Still shaken by the inscription she thought, Stop—stop and look at this sensibly!
But it was impossible to sort out the astonished thoughts bombarding her: the Acharya did not look Thai, or Chinese, or even Asian, and he spoke excellent English. The holy man had told Bonchoo that he could not help them because he lived in peace with his neighbors. When she had accosted him herself he had repeated this, telling her very flatly that he couldn't help them, and then... not Mr. Pollifax, she had flung at him, his name is Cyrus Reed.
And abruptly everything had changed, he had looked startled and turned away, and when he turned back he had agreed to let one of the monks guide them to the Shan camp.
Cyrus had said, We grew up together, same high school in Connecticut, we called him Joker Matthews.
Cyrus Reed, the Acharya had repeated, and then, You are American?
Bishop had said, There was never any clue to what happened, the theory now is that he was abducted for ransom, struggled and was killed and buried in the jungle.
My book. From mama on my birthday. John Lloyd Matthews.
Impossible, she thought.
She emerged from her convoluted thoughts to realize that Bonchoo was calling to her from the parapet. She called back, "Yes?"
"I have given Nai Mornajay rice water; he took it very well," he shouted down to her. "Now it is time for us to eat."
"Yes," she said and stood up, resolutely putting aside her turbulent thoughts for
later. What was important now, dwarfing any foolish speculations about the Acharya, was that after they ate their rice they would set out for the Shan camp, and her heart beat faster with a sickening suspense as to whether they would find Cyrus there.
The Acharya did not eat his rice with them.
"How did you find the Acharya?" she asked Prasert as they seated themselves on the floor to eat. Doubtfully she regarded the bowls of food in front of her: there was the ubiquitous sticky-rice and pot of tea, but a bowl of fried prawns had been added today, which Mrs. Pollifax contemplated with enthusiasm until she realized that this modest offering had to be shared with five monks and Bonchoo. "And what made you decide to be a monk?"
"But we are novices, not monks," Prasert told her, turning to his three friends to translate this. "Me, I come here from very small, very poor village in the mountains—two hours' walk from here—and what I wish for is to become English-speaking tour guide, very important nice job! It is the abbot in my small village who send me," he explained. "Because the Acharya can teach me good English, and the Five Precepts, too."
Mrs. Pollifax picked out of the bowl her second and last prawn and molded rice into a ball to follow it. "But how did the abbot find the Acharya?"
"Ah," said Prasert, beaming at her, "he once spend three days here to learn from him and speak to him."
"How long ago?" she asked quickly.
Prasert shrugged. "This I do not know. Maybe nobody know when the Acharya come here; he is—what is word? —very secret."
Bonchoo said dryly, "And to find him it is necessary to be lost in the forest, I think."
"Yes, yes," Prasert said, nodding and laughing. "That is just how my abbot find him, this holy one no longer tied to the wheel."
Mrs. Pollifax nodded. "Detached," she said, and put down her bowl of rice, conceding her lack of appetite. "But I am very attached to life just now and filled with a desire to find my husband. I'm anxious to leave," she told Bonchoo. "While you finish I'll tell Mornajay that we're going."
Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle Page 14