The Watermill

by Arnold Zable

  When people meet Han Shan,

  They all say he’s crazy.

  His look doesn’t attract the gaze

  And he is wrapped up in a cloth gown.

  I speak and they don’t understand.

  When they speak, I keep silent,

  So I tell people,

  Come and visit me on Cold Mountain.

  We journeyed on, the three of us, Han Shan and his sidekicks, Feng-kan and Shih-te. One night, in a mountain inn, we were joined at dinner by a teacher, a middle-aged man of the Dong people. He listened intently to our tales of travel, and the following morning he joined us. He left home with little money and without informing his family, and for six days he attached himself to us. He was dressed in a shabby suit, and as thin as a beanpole. We dubbed him the ‘Wine Monster’ since he was given to drinking binges.

  We stayed overnight in a mountain town and after the evening meal, made our way to the workers’ club. Long-haired youths in tight jeans, cowboy hats, leather boots and Hawaiian shirts danced disco. Their attire and dancing were modest acts of rebellion. The tables stood by the walls, forming a circle around the dance floor. The Wine Monster sat with us, draining glass after glass of wine in a frenzy.

  You are lucky, he slurred. You are passing through, but I must stay and return to my teaching. Year after year, my students graduate and leave for distant places and higher studies, while I stay back here. Curse my luck. Curse my fate. Curse the mountains. They are strangling me. He runs a finger across his neck in a cutting gesture.

  The Wine Monster stumbles from the table to the dance floor, hips jiggling, spindly legs prancing in jerky movements. He lowers his arms towards his feet, then stretches them above his head and leaps up, arms fully extended. His steps lengthen, his movements become more expansive. The young men back away and the circle of onlookers widens.

  His hand moves from his heart to the air in a gesture of adoration for Chairman Mao, in a mock version of the loyalty dance, which he had performed during the Cultural Revolution as a member of a propaganda team travelling from village to village. He weaves his way back to the table, resumes his drinking and breaks out in a drunken rendition of ‘Chairman Mao Is the Red Sun in Our Hearts’.

  We leave the hall and make our way back to the hotel. The Wine Monster is unmindful of the chill; his down coat is unzipped. He strides ahead and comes to a stop halfway across a bridge. He places his hands on the rails, leans over and yells at the water. He lifts his head and screams at the skies and the upper slopes of the mountain. His voice echoes and his slim shadow darts over the roadway.

  He turns to us as we approach and sings: ‘Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts’, the same line, over and again, in the same unhinged melody. People pass by. No one takes any notice.

  The following day he is contrite and melancholic. He directs us in a succession of busses deep into Dong country, to the towns and hamlets of his people. Clusters of tiled roofs rise above riverbanks in isolated valleys, creeping up the lower slopes, beneath a succession of fields and terraces. In the centre of each settlement stands a drum tower. It rises above the double-storey wooden houses and is topped by a roof structure with multiple eaves curving upwards.

  The towers are inspired by the shape of giant cedars, says the Wine Monster. He has assumed the role of guide. He is alert and inflated with a sense of purpose. They were built without nails or rivets, he says. My people are master architects and builders. We know how to transform our beloved trees into meeting places.

  He is warming to his task. His reticence is gone. His eyes are alight and his face has softened. He is at ease in his surroundings; his burden has momentarily lifted. He speaks a rapid-fire English, and is surprisingly eloquent for one who acquired the language by rote learning and listening to BBC broadcasts on shortwave radio.

  The towers are supported by sixteen wooden pillars, he says. The village elders summon the residents by drum to meetings. The four central pillars represent the four seasons. The other twelve represent the months of the year. We worship big trees and I worship wine, he laughs. And in Dong villages wine flows like water.

  We approach the Wine Monster’s home village late in the afternoon. We step from the bus and are drawn through the streets by the refrains of a Dong opera. The musicians perform on a podium in the central square in front of the drum tower. The villagers sit on benches, their eyes riveted on the performers. Children run about. Pigs and geese wander in the mud, and babies nestle on their mothers’ backs in cloth papooses.

  Mid-opera, the skies open. The rain pours, and the water rises, gushing through the alleys, carving rivulets. The villagers run to the drum tower, seeking the warmth of the log fire that burns permanently in a pit within the four central pillars. The touring opera company continues its performance. The voices are muffled by the downpour. The Wine Monster is tranquil. Drink quietly, he says. This is the way of my people.

  It was dark by the time the opera ended. We hurried on slippery paths to the rooms assigned to us, and slept the sound sleep of the weary traveller to the drumming of rain on the roofs of the village; and woke to the sounds of the mountain shedding water. The roads were closed. Frost glazed the fallow earth and rooftops.

  This is how it was for several days, leaving us stranded. There was no sky to be seen. Cloud descended on the lower slopes and hung in the valley. Our gloom was dispelled by hours of feasting hosted by the village headmen and a foray, under the guidance of the Wine Monster, to a Flower Bridge.

  A masterpiece, he enthused. The bridge columns and planks were interlocked tightly, and the bridge was covered with roof tiles engraved with flowers. Dragons, phoenixes, snakes and tigers curled around the wooden pillars. The ceiling was adorned with peacocks, and the walls with paintings of ox fights, scenes of battle and of daily life: villagers hunting, weaving and playing musical instruments.

  A masterpiece, the Wine Monster repeated. Hours later, back in the village, on the earth floor beneath the tower, he was dancing: the swaying of his hips and the flow of his arms learned in childhood and refined by tradition, a sharp contrast to the mock loyalty dance he had performed at the workers’ club days earlier.

  His mood had shifted in the past two days from despair to elation. The nights flowed with the dialect of the Dong, and with young men and women passing by in the darkness, their laughter approaching and fading. And the four of us, seated by the fire in the Drum Tower with the men and women of the village. Drinking quietly.

  We left by bus, a band of four. The slopes were clothed in damp green forest. Ice clung to shrubs and pylons; snow slid from the branches and dropped silently beneath them. Wood burners lit up the windows of roadside houses. Giant waterwheels churned in mountain streams, while fishermen spread their nets in shallow waters. A funeral procession moved by, mourners dressed in white, carrying bouquets of paper flowers.

  The spell of our stay with the Dong was broken. The Wine Monster sat alone, flagon in hand, refusing company. Brooding. His mood was as dark as the soaked landscape. The mountains are strangling me, he slurred. You are the red sun that shines in our heart, he sang, then lapsed back into a sullen silence. And in the evening, after we had stopped for the night, he vanished, leaving us as he had joined us, without reason or forewarning.

  That night, I dreamt: Two men on motorcycles are riding up a mountain trail. The road is covered in ice and hoarfrost. It runs alongside a sheer drop, disappearing far below into the depths of a valley. The men are confident in their movements. They turn onto a rock ledge and accelerate in circles, carving ruts into the ice surface; then hurtle towards the edge of the cliff and over it.

  They look up as they fall, detached from their motorcycles. I stand above the chasm and watch them. On their faces, expressions of fear and wonder. One lands feet-first in a muddy bog, the other lands on his back beside him. For a moment, the men are inert. Then they begin to move. They struggle to their feet, look up at the cliff and shake their heads in disbelief. They are elate
d, and I am tempted. Perhaps I can do this. Dare. Leap. Surrender to the mountain.

  We travelled on. One morning we came across a wedding party led by a band of musicians. Relatives carried furniture and bedding. A truck, loaded with guests, inched through the narrow streets. We followed the parade to the upper slopes. The women were gathered in one house, the men in another. The bride’s home was decorated with yellow banners painted with the double happiness symbol. A couplet on red paper framed the doorway.

  N translated: Above the lintel: ‘A long prosperous marriage’. On the left-hand side: ‘Work together with skilful hands to make the rivers and mountains beautiful’. And on the right: ‘People in love with each other carry the world on their iron shoulders’. And if the marriage fails, laughs N, there is always the way of Han Shan and the retreat to Cold Mountain.

  For Weipo there is no retreat to the mountain. Her grandson meets us mid-afternoon at the bus station. B is another student of mine home for the Spring Festival. He guides the three of us through the town centre. The main street is lined with government buildings giving way to streets that narrow into muddy alleys.

  B points out the homes of relatives and former school friends. A group of teenage boys play pool at an outdoor table. Flocks of geese forage on clay paths. Piglets cling to the teats of a sow stretched out in the mud on a vacant allotment, and dogs lie in the dirt eyeing us lazily. And, at the door of his house, Weipo, B’s maternal grandmother, is waiting.

  She stands in front of her clan like the leader of a delegation, wearing a black headscarf, a navy-blue Mao suit and slippers. Children peak out from behind her, shy and excited by the arrival of the foreigner. She embraces me. I am a teacher of her grandson, and that is all she need know. I am welcome.

  Weipo leads me into the house, and her children and grandchildren trail behind her. She walks with a stoop, but there is strength in her gaze and pride in her bearing. She ushers us into the room she has set aside for the three guests. Members of the clan spill through the doorway. They laugh and comment. This is a spectacle, and I am the object.

  This is where we will stay for the remaining days of the journey, content to be down from the mountain: going out daily to the valley, and feasting each night on glutinous rice, boiled chicken, pork in sweet sauce, mushroom stuffed with beef, and pickled cabbage. Fired up by toasts of white wine and the nightly ritual, as Weipo’s newborn great-grandchild, Xiao Taiyang, Little Sun, is swaddled in woollens of red, white and yellow and passed around the room from person to person like a bobbing balloon to her destination, the arms of Weipo.

  Weipo is the matriarch. She is continually on the move, releasing hens from their coops, gathering eggs from wood-baskets, planting and tending, feeding wood into the stove and hanging stringed sausages alongside strips of pork from the beams of the kitchen. Her life is centred on her brood of descendants.

  Her territory embraces the homes of her neighbours. They come to her for advice. She is expert in home remedies, the nursing of animals and the rearing of children. She is the arbiter of domestic disputes and petty squabbles. She presides over a maze of alleys and wooden cottages, and navigates her confined kingdom, step by step, breath by breath, from the kitchen to the room where the family gathers, and out to the garden, eyes cast downwards, ensuring the safety of her footing. From time to time she lifts her head and looks up at the ranges that encircle the valley. She knows what lies beyond. She has no need to venture further.

  She had come through the mountains as a child, with her family, seventy years ago, in search of a life beyond the impoverishment of their home village. When they laid their eyes on the valley, its fertile soils and the protection the mountains afforded, they knew they had found what they were looking for. Weipo has lived in this house ever since.

  Over the years she has seen the hamlet expand into a town. She does not wish to dwell on the past. There have been dark times and good times, is all she will say. Despite it all, she views her life as a steady ascent out of poverty. And now this unexpected late-life gift: with festival days restored and, with them, the return of family members from all corners of the province. She knows they will journey back each year, by bus and train, in trucks and four-wheel drives, making their way through the mountains, as she did, seven decades earlier.

  On festival nights, we cross the river on a passenger canoe and walk past fishing boats lying on the banks beneath banyan trees. We climb the lower reaches of the foothills above the town. The government buildings in the centre of town are ablaze with new year decorations. On either side of the river, wooden houses give way to farmlands in the expansive valley. From this distance, the town appears to huddle at the base of the towering mountain.

  It is the Year of the Ox, and Weipo lights the candles and incense in front of the altar that sits on a dressing table. The centrepiece is a statuette of Guanyin, the goddess of compassion. She is flanked by Lao Tse and a fat laughing Buddha. Chubby infants crawl over his shoulders and pot belly. On the wall above the altar, a poster of a tiger, edged by the lines of a couplet: The Tiger runs like lightning. And this lightning is more beautiful than the colours of the rainbow.

  Against the opposite wall of the room stands a television on which there sits a bowl of plastic chrysanthemums. Above it there are posters of the Monkey King and Premier Chou En Lai presenting a bouquet of flowers to Chairman Mao. Their complexions are airbrushed smooth and their heads encircled by halos. Weipo makes her way outside as the evening fireworks erupt.

  Her day of work is done. She sits on a stool in the clay street in front of the house. She lifts her head. Her gaze extends beyond the streets, beyond the festivities, to the mountain. She closes her eyes and listens to the murmur of conversation, the slap of cards at outdoor tables, the explosions of crackers, and the weary cries of peddlers selling their dwindling supplies of snacks and fireworks. She dozes off and awakes to the crowing of roosters disoriented by the lights blazing post-midnight.

  Tomorrow the farewells will begin, family gatherings at the bus station, with stoic embraces before the return journeys to colleges and workplaces. But at this moment, winter and spring are finely balanced, and the mountains a circle of guardians shielding the valley from outside intrusions.

  Weipo opens her eyes and turns to me. Her habitual sternness is gone, and I glimpse a radiance I have seldom encountered. Her eyes are alight with wonder, and her gaze casts warmth on all it touches. She is both childlike and ageless; she has vanquished the boundaries between dream and reality. She lifts her hands to receive Little Sun, wraps her in her arms and rocks her to sleep. She has no need to leave the valley. No desire to be elsewhere.

  On our return to Huaxi I resume my walks into the countryside. Families are back at work in the fields. The ranges have regained their coating of green, and the parklands their canopies of plum and peach blossoms. Chill winds give way to intimate breezes and violent rainstorms. The Huaxi River overflows its banks and floods the rice paddies. On the willow beside the watermill, buds are appearing.

  From a distance, all is serene and interdependent, symmetry and movement, the landscape a tableau of farmer and plough, paddies and fields of rape flower. But close-up all is brute force and labour, mud and shit, muscle and tendon strained to the limit. The beasts can be heard snorting and rasping. Farmers, stripped to the waist, thigh-deep in mud, exhort their yoked horses to keep moving. Pleading, cajoling, they will them on, at times lovingly, at others beating them and shouting. An ageing farmer bent under a heavy load of grain struggles up a steep path. A young child pushes a cart piled high with the last of the winter harvest. A bullock gasps for breath as its owner whips it in a frenzy.

  This is how it is, N says, when he accompanies me on one of my walks. And why we study, bend our backs to our books, in search of ways to ease the burden. N’s language, and his formal expression are of another era, partly acquired from textbooks. By now, I am accustomed to his way of speaking. I have met many others like him. His sentiments reflect the a
spirations of a man raised by an ethos of sacrifice and service. Despite it all—his father’s imprisonment, the cruelty and chaos he had witnessed, and his years of ostracism—N remains a true believer.

  As with the countryside, so it was with the entire country, but in reverse. Viewed from afar, the revolution had been betrayed and reduced to accusation, rampage and murder. Yet after months of living here, I begin to see the nuances and the humanity of those who had endured it, reflected in tales of exile and struggle and embodied in N’s childhood dream:

  I saw a big bird flying. My arms turned into wings. I flew towards a tree and perched there. I saw several boys playing on the grasslands. I shouted to them. They heard my voice and told me to fly down and play with them. I did not want to do this. The boys were upset. They picked up stones and threw them at me. To avoid them, I flew back into the skies. I flew for a long time and grew anxious. I wanted to fly back home but I was too tired. I fell back to earth. My back hurt. I woke up and found myself lying on the floor beside my bed. I stood up, felt the ground beneath me, and kept moving.

  It is twenty minutes by bus to Guiyang, the province capital. Gangs of labourers are at work on building sites on a Sunday morning. The streets are dense with factories and high-rise apartments. A pall of black smoke drifts above the city. The pavements throng with shoppers. Iron railings prevent the crowds from spilling onto the roadway.

  Through open doorways, women and children can be seen shaping sheets of metal into woks and watering cans. Carpenters work in dimly lit garages. Barbers stand on the pavement, clipping the hair of customers seated on footstools, alongside tailors plying their trade on sewing machines. Booksellers stand behind stacks of paperbacks.

  Amid this tumult, I come upon the Little Gentleman. We collide as he steps onto the pavement from the Children’s Palace: a funfair of carousels, slides and monkey bars. He wears a weathered grey suit and a white shirt neatly tucked into his trousers. Cloth patches reinforce the jacket elbows. His shoes are worn but well-polished. He is chubby, his weight offset by his alert eyes and brisk movement. His hair is a crewcut black and he walks with short rapid steps, back straight, shoulders open. He is ten-years-old, but carries himself like an adult.