Now the rains were full of black ash, falling in a watery mud. Black rain. The call came for Bai and Iwa’s squad to hurry down to the plain and join the general assault as soon as they could. They ran down the trails and assembled some twenty li behind the front line of the battle, and started marching. They were to hit at the very end of the flank, on the plain itself but right at the foot of the foothills, ready to scale the first rise of the hills if there was any resistance to their charge.
That was the plan, but as they came up to the front word came that the Muslims had broken and were in full retreat, and they joined the chase.
But the Muslims were in flight, the Indians close on their heels, and the Chinese could only follow the two faster armies across the fields and forests, over canals and through the breaks in bamboo fences and walls, and groups of houses too small even to be called villages, all still and silent, usually burned, and yet slowing them down somehow nevertheless. Dead bodies on the ground in knots, already bloating. The full meaning of embodiment made manifest here by its opposite, diesembodiment, death — departure of the soul, leaving behind so little: a putrefying mass, stuff like what one found in a sausage. Nothing human about it. Except for here or there, a face undestroyed, even sometimes undisturbed; an Indian man lying there on the ground for instance, staring sideways but utterly still, not moving, not breathing; the statue of what must have been a very impressive man, well built, strong shoulders, capable — a commanding, high-foreheaded, moustached face, eyes like fish in the market, round and surprised, but still — impressive. Bai had to say a charm to be able to walk by him, and then they were in a zone where the land itself was smoking like the dead zone of Gansu, pools of silvery gassed water reeking in water holes and the air full of smoke and dust, cordite, blood haze. The bardo itself would be looking much like this, crowded now with new arrivals all angry and confused, in agony, the worst possible way to enter the bardo. Here the empty mirror of it, blasted and still. The Chinese army marched through in silence.
Bai found Iwa, and they made their way into the burned ruins of Bodh-Gaya, to a park on the west bank of the Phalgu River. This was where the Bodhi Tree had stood, they were told, the old assattha tree, pipal tree, under which the Buddha had received enlightenment so many centuries before. The area had taken as many hits as the peak of Chomolungma, and no trace of tree or park or village or stream remained, only black rendered mud for as far as the eye could see.
A group of Indian officers discussed root fragments someone had found in the mud near what some thought had been the location of the tree. Bai didn’t recognize the language. He sat down with a small fragment of bark in his hands. Iwa went over to see what the officers were saying.
Then Kuo stood before Bai. “Cut is the branch,” he said, offering a small twig from the Bodhi Tree.
Bai took it from him. From his left hand; Kuo’s right hand was still missing. “Kuo,” Bai said, and swallowed. “I’m surprised to see you.”
Kuo gave him a look.
“So we are in the bardo after all,” Bai said.
Kuo nodded. “You didn’t always believe me, did you, but it’s true. Here you see it —” waving his hand at the black smoking plain. “The floor of the universe. Again.”
“But why?” Bai said. “I just don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“Get what I’m supposed to be doing. Life after life — I remember them now!” He thought about it, seeing back through the years. “I remember them now, and I’ve tried in every one. I keep trying!” Out across the black plain it seemed they could see together the faint afterimages of their previous lives, dancing in the infinite silk of lightly falling rain. “It doesn’t seem to be making any difference. What I do makes no difference.”
“Yes, Bai. Perhaps so. But after all you are a fool. A good-natured fucking idiot.”
“Don’t, Kuo, I’m not in the mood,” though his face was attempting painfully to smile, pleased to be ribbed again. Iwa and he had tried to do this for each other, but no one could bring it off like Kuo. “I may not be a great leader like you but I’ve done some good things, and they haven’t made a bit of difference. There seem to be no rules of dharma that actually pertain.”
Kuo sat down next to him, crossed his legs and made himself comfortable. “Well, who knows? I’ve been thinking these things over myself, this time out in the bardo. There’s been a lot of time, believe me — so many have been tossed out here at once that there’s quite a waiting line, it’s just like the rest of the war, a logistical nightmare, and I’ve been watching you all struggle on, bashing against things like moths in a bottle, and I know I did it too, and I’ve wondered. I’ve thought sometimes that maybe it went wrong back when I was Kheim and you were Butterfly, a little girl we all loved. Do you remember that one?”
Bai shook his head. “Tell me.”
“As Kheim I was Annamese, I continued the proud tradition of the great Chinese admirals being foreigners and disreputable, I had been a pirate king for years on the long coast of Annam, and the Chinese made a treaty with me as they would with any great potentate. Struck a deal in which I agreed to lead an invasion of Nippon, at least the sea aspect of it and perhaps more.
“Anyway we missed all that for lack of a wind, and went on and discovered the ocean continents, and found you, and then we took you, and lost you, and saved you from the executioner god of the southern people; and that’s when I felt it, coming back down the mountain after we had saved you. I aimed my pistol at people and pulled the trigger, and felt the power of life and death in my hands. I could kill them, and they deserved it, bloody cannibals that they were, killers of children. I could do it merely by pointing at them. And it seemed to me then that my so-much-greater power had a meaning to it. That our superiority in weapons came out of a general superiority of thought that included a superiority of morals. That we were better than they were. I strode back down to the ships and sailed west still feeling that we were superior beings, like gods to those horrid savages. And that’s why Butterfly died.
“You died to teach me that I was wrong — that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in the hope that it wouldn’t happen to them, until the human world died, and we all fell into this preta realm and then to bell.
“So our little jati is stuck here with everyone else, no matter what you do, not that you have been notably effectual, I must say again, Bai, speaking of your tendency towards credulous simplicity, gullibility and general soft-hearted namby-pamby ineffectiveness —”
“Hey,” Bai said. “Not fair. I’ve been helping you. I’ve just been going along with you.”
“Well, all right. Granted. In any case we’re all in the bardo together now, and headed for the lower realms again, at best the realm of the human, but possibly spinning down the death spiral into the hellworlds always underfoot, we may have done it and are in the spin you can’t pull out of, humanity lost to us for a time even as a possibility, so much harm have we done. Stupid fucking bastards! Damn it, do you think I haven’t been trying too?” Kuo popped to his feet, agitated. “Do you think you’re the only one who has tried to make some good in this world?” He shook his solitary fist at Bai, and then at the lowering grey clouds. “But we failed! We killed reality itself, do you understand me! Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Bai said, hugging his knees and shivering miserably. “I understand.”
“So. Now we are in this lower realm. We must make do. Our dharma still commands right action, even here. In the hope of small advances upwards. Until reality itself be re-established, by many millions of lives of effort. The whole world will have to be rebuilt. That’s where we are now,” and with a
farewell tap to Bai’s arm he walked away, sinking into the black mud deeper with every step, until he had disappeared.
“Hey,” Bai said. “Kuo! Don’t leave!”
After a while Iwa returned and stood before him, looked down quizzically at him.
“Well?” Bai said, lifting his head from his knees, collecting himself. “What is it? Will they save the Bodhi Tree?”
“Don’t worry about the tree,” Iwa said. “They’ll get a shoot from a daughter tree in Lanka. It’s happened before. Best worry about the people.”
“More shoots there too. On to the next life. To a better time.” Bai shouted it after Kuo: “To a better time!”
Iwa sighed. He sat down where Kuo had been sitting. Rain fell on them. A long time passed in exhausted silence.
“The thing is,” Iwa said, “what if there is no next life? That’s what I think. This is it. Fan Chen said the soul and body are just two aspects of the same thing. He speaks of sharpness and the knife, soul and body. Without knife, no sharpness.”
“Without sharpness, no knife.”
“Yes . . .”
“And sharpness goes on, sharpness never dies.”
“But look at those dead bodies over there. Who they were won’t come back. When death comes, we don’t come back.”
Bai thought of the Indian man, lying so still on the ground. He said, “You’re just distraught. Of course we come back. I was talking to Kuo this very minute.”
Iwa gazed at him. “You shouldn’t try to hold on, Bai. This is what the Buddha learned, right here. Don’t try to stop time. No one can do it.”
“Sharpness remains. I tell you, he was cutting me up same as always!”
“We have to try to accept change. And change leads to death.”
“And then through death.” Bai said this as cheerfully as he could, but his voice was desolate. He missed Kuo.
Iwa considered what Bai had said, with a look that seemed to say he had been hoping that a Buddhist at the Bodhi Tree would perhaps have had something more helpful to say. But what could you say? The Buddha himself had said it: suffering is real. You have to face it, live with it. There is no escape.
After a while longer Bai got up and went over to see what the officers were doing. They were chanting a sutra, in Sanskrit perhaps, Bai thought, and he joined in softly with the “Lengyan jing”, in Chinese. And as the day wore on many Buddhists in both armies gathered around the site, hundreds of them, the mud was covered with people, and they said prayers in all the languages of Buddhism, standing there on the burnt land that smoked in the rain for as far as the eye could see, black, grey and silver. Finally they fell silent. Peace in the heart, compassion, peace. Sharpness remained in them.
BOOK NINE
Asara
ONE
On sunny mornings the parks on the lakefront were filled with families out walking. In the early spring, before the plants had done more than create the tight green buds soon to blossom in their profusion of colours, the hungry swans would congregate in the gleaming black water beside the promenade to fight over the loaves of stale bread thrown at them by children. This had been one of Budur’s favourite activities as a young girl, it had cast her into gales of laughter to see the swans flop and tussle for the scraps; now she watched the new kids convulsed by the same hilarity, with a stab of grief for her lost childhood, and for the awareness that the swans, though beautiful and comical, were also desperate and starving. She wished she had the boldness to join the children and throw more bread to the poor things. But if she did it now she would look odd, like one of the mentally deficient ones on their trip out from their school. And in any case there was not a great deal of bread left in their house anyway.
Sunlight bounced on the water, and the buildings lining the back of the lakeshore promenade glowed lemon, peach and apricot, as if lit from within by some light trapped in their stone. Budur walked back through the old town towards home, through the grey granite and black wood of the ancient buildings. Turi had begun as a Roman town, a way station on their main route through the Alps; Father had once driven them up to an obscure alpine pass called the Keyhole, where a stretch of the Roman road was still there, switchbacking through the grass like a petrified dragon’s back, looking lonely for the feet of soldiers and traders.
Now after centuries of obscurity Turi was a way station again, this time for trains, and the greatest city in all of central Firanja, the capital of the united Alpine emirates.
The city centre was bustling and squeaky with trams, but Budur liked to walk. She ignored Ahab, her chaperon; though she liked him personally, a simple man with few pretensions, she did not like his job, which included accompanying her on her excursions. She shunned him on principle as an affront to her dignity. She knew also that he would report her behaviour to Father, and when he reported her refusal to acknowledge his presence, yet another small protest of harem would reach Father, if only indirectly.
She led Ahab up through the apartments studding the hillside overlooking the city, to High Street. The wall around their house was beautiful, a tall patterned weave of green and grey dressed stones. The wooden gate was topped by a stone arch seemingly held in a network of wistaria vines; you could pull out the keystone and it would still stand. Ahmet, their gatekeeper, was in his seat in the cosy little wooden closet on the inside of the gateway, where he held forth to all who wanted to pass, his tea tray ready to serve those who had time to tarry.
Inside the house Aunt Idelba was talking on the telephone, which was set on a table in the inner courtyard under the eaves, where anyone could hear you. This was Father’s way of trying to keep anything untoward from ever being said, but the truth was that Aunt Idelba was usually talking about microscopic nature and the mathematics of the interiors of atoms, and so no one could have any idea what she was talking about. Budur liked to listen to her anyway, because it reminded her of the fairy tales Aunt Idelba had told in the past when Budur was younger, or her cooking talk with Mother in the kitchen — cooking was one of her passions, and she would rattle off spells, recipes, procedures and tools, all mysterious and suggestive just like this talk on the telephone, as if she were cooking up a new world. And sometimes she would get off the phone looking worried, and absentmindedly accept Budur’s hugs and admit that this was precisely the case: the ilmi, the scientists, were indeed cooking up a new world. Or they could be. Once she rang off flushed pink, and danced a little minuet around the courtyard, singing nonsense syllables, and their laundry ditty, “God is great, great is God, clean our clothes, clean our souls.”
This time she rang off and did not even see Budur, but stared up at the bit of sky visible from the courtyard.
“What is it, Idelba? Are you feeling hem?” Hem was the women’s term for a kind of mild depression that had no obvious cause.
Idelba shook her head. “No, this is a mushkil,” which was a specific problem.
“What is it?”
“Well . . . Simply put, the investigators at the laboratory are getting some very strange results. That’s what it comes down to. No one can say what they mean.”
This laboratory Idelba talked to over the phone was currently her main contact with the world outside their home. She had been a mathematics teacher and researcher in Nsara, and, with her husband, an investigator of microscopic nature. But her husband’s untimely death had revealed some irregularities in his affairs, and Idelba had been left destitute; and the job they had shared had turned out to be his in the end, so that she had nowhere to work, and nowhere to live. Or so Yasmina had said; Idelba herself never spoke about it. She had shown up one day with a single suitcase, weeping, to confer with Budur’s father, her half-brother. He had agreed to put her up for a time. This, Father explained later, was one of the things harems were for; they protected women who had nowhere else to go. “Your mother and you girls complain about the system, but really, what is the alternative? The suffering of women left alone would be enormous.”
Mother and
Budur’s older cousin, Yasmina, would snort or snarl at this, cheeks turning red. Rema and Aisha and Fatima would look at them curiously, trying to understand what they should feel about what to them was after all the natural order of things. Aunt Idelba never said anything about it one way or the other, neither thanks nor complaint. Old acquaintances still called her on the phone, especially a nephew of hers, who apparently had a problem he thought she could help him with; he called regularly. Once Idelba tried to explain why to Budur and her sisters, with the aid of a blackboard and chalk.
“Atoms have shells around them, like the spheres in the heavens in the old drawings, all surrounding the heartknot of the atom, which is small but heavy. Three kinds of particles clump together in the heartknot, some with yang, some with yin, some neuter, in different amounts for each substance, and they’re held bound together there by a strong force, which is very strong, but also very local, in that you don’t have to get far away from the heartknot for the force to reduce a great deal.”
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 55