Gendün Gyatso had no idea how to explain the situation to them, and it looked like the two monks were so insistent that they wouldn’t give him the chance to do so anyway. “Why don’t you get up? We’ll talk about this later,” he said with resignation, making them sit back on the bed. “I’ve got a wife,” he added with a sigh.
The two monks took one look at each other and, almost in unison, replied, “The Nyizer incarnations have always had consorts.”
“But my wife is a … and I’m a drunk too.”
“The Nyizer incarnations have always partaken of the elixirs.”
Gendün Gyatso’s mind was in turmoil. What’s going on? he thought. Is this all just a coincidence? All of a sudden he thought of Lhatso and felt an irrepressible urge to see her. Hitching up his cassock, he bolted out the door and tore off. The two old monks went after him like cops chasing a criminal.
A crowd had gathered at the doorway of the Red Lantern Bar. Two policemen roughly shoved Lhatso into their car, then sped off to the piercing blare of the siren.
Gendün Gyatso stared after the police car, stupefied.
That day was the coldest of the year in the county seat. On the mountain peaks thirteen thousand feet above sea level, it was probably even colder.
10
REVENGE
Since the stern, swarthy face of our clan leader was never graced by even the hint of a smile, he gave people the impression of being very fearsome. But in reality he was a man who only ever thought of the well-being of his people, so he was respected by all.
When that swarthy face came in through the door of our home, Mother and I leaped up in a flash to offer him the seat of honor, but without saying a word he motioned for me to come outside. Like a servant, I bowed my head and followed him. When we had gotten far enough away that Mother couldn’t hear us, the clan leader turned suddenly and said, “Boy, your father’s killer is in my house at this very moment.”
My heart began to pound intensely, and I had to keep swallowing my saliva.
“But the man is my friend. I trust that you won’t cause any problems.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he took off without giving me the chance to respond.
I had heard that my father’s killer was the leader of the clan from across the river. He was brave and brutal. He had killed many people, but not once had he paid the price for it. My father had relied on stealing to make his living; apart from the meager renown that came with being called a brave lad, he didn’t have a thing to his name. In the winter that I turned nine, Father crossed the frozen river to go steal from the clan on the other side. Unfortunately, he fell into their hands, and after subjecting him to unimaginable torments, the clan leader himself killed my father and threw his body onto the river ice. Since my family was so poor back then, people felt bad that such a terrible thing had befallen us and everyone consoled and helped us as much as they could, especially our clan leader. He went across the river again and again to seek compensation and did his very best to look after my mother and me. But by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, we still hadn’t received any compensation, let alone taken revenge for my father’s murder, and as a result I became a target for mockery and abuse. More and more people began to openly insult me. “The father was a meat-eating vulture, but the son’s a shit-eating crow,” they said. It got to the point that I couldn’t hold my head up among the young men of the clan.
Ah! Were the Dharma protectors looking out for me today, bringing the lamb to the mouth of the wolf’s den? Or was it to be the day that I followed in my father’s footsteps? Either way, if I didn’t grasp an opportunity like this with both hands, I’d have no right to call myself my father’s son, and I’d be even more frozen out of the community.
“The look on your face! What did the clan leader say to you?” As soon as I came back inside my mother seized my hand with an anxious expression.
“Nothing. It’s nothing. He just asked me to help him with something,” I said, picking up the worn-out knife from where it hung on the side of the tent. Removing it from its sheath, I began to sharpen it vigorously on the grindstone. Mother became even more agitated, praying desperately to the goddess Tara while beseeching me, almost in tears. “There’s definitely something going on. If you won’t tell me what it is, I’ll go ask the clan leader myself!”
It looked like I couldn’t keep it a secret anymore. I stopped sharpening the knife and told her the truth. Much to my surprise, Mother calmed down. “Oh, there really is such a thing as karma! Your dear old father used to say that you’ve got to be brave when that crucial moment arrives, and you’ve got to be even more quick-witted. Remember that well. That’s all I have to say.” She then began to chant the “Ode to Tara” as though nothing were the matter.
I sharpened the old knife until it was like a razor, then stashed it in my sleeve. With all my might I tried to suppress my madly pounding heartbeat, and adopting a calm and collected air, I entered the home of the clan leader. The first thing that appeared before me was a woman making tsampa. The white tsampa flour was piled up almost three inches high all around the blue millstone. Sitting carefree atop the stove was a powerful-looking man whose braid, face, neck … well, in short, whose whole body radiated a glossy sheen as though he’d been sprinkled all over with oil. This was surely the man who had killed my father.
May the deities and the Dharma protectors come to my aid tonight! With this prayer in my mind, I rushed forward and plunged the knife as hard as I could into the right side of the man’s chest. Without pulling out the blade I drove it further in, and from his insides I could hear the cracking sound of either flesh, muscle, or bone splitting apart. As the man’s eyeballs bulged, he gradually fell back onto the floor. Then, withdrawing the knife and grasping the handle with both hands, I continued to stab him indiscriminately. Blood spurted from each of the wounds like a fountain and covered my entire face in a shower of droplets, turning it warm.
At that moment I heard a piercing cry. Turning around, I saw the woman who had been making tsampa scurrying out of the door on all fours.
I continued to stab the knife into his body—or corpse—over and over, just like I used to aimlessly stick my spade into a pile of fresh dung when I was a child. Eventually I no longer had the energy to pull the knife out and was panting so hard I could barely breathe. A searing pain raged in my head, and I felt nauseated. The earth was shaking and the sky was spinning, and I had no choice but to stop. It turns out killing someone is more painful than being killed, I thought.
Leaning my weight on the handle of the knife, I breathed heavily. When I looked at the man—the corpse—before me, all I could see in his wide-open eyes was glistening white, not a hint of black at all.
His sleek, oily braid, his face, his neck—his whole body was now completely covered in blood. Now that I thought about it, the first time I stabbed him I must have hit his heart or severed an artery, since the whole time he hadn’t even reached for the knife hanging at his waist, let alone unsheathed it.
As I wiped the blood from my eyes and staggered out the door, I caught a blurry glimpse of the killer’s blood seeping into the white tsampa by the millstone, turning it red and causing it to drip down the side. Just then the clan leader returned home. His swarthy face surveyed the entire room before he calmly proceeded over to the body, where he briefly checked the killer’s pulse like a doctor examining a patient. “How could someone who killed one of my people ever be my friend?” he said as he closed the man’s eyelids.
This was nine years after my father’s murder, in the winter of the year I turned eighteen. The clan leader had some men come to take the killer’s body and throw it on the frozen river. I felt like a man who’d just been released from prison.
Ever since then, I’ve had the respect of everyone in the clan, so much so that when important clan business is being discussed I always get called to the meetings. The sad thing is that my thoughts have begun to weigh heavily on my mind, to the point that I can ha
rdly get a good night’s sleep. From what I’ve heard, my father’s killer had a nine-year-old son. Now I am his father’s killer. I should get married as soon as possible, so that when I die by his knife, I’ll have someone to take revenge for me.
11
NOSE RINGS
ONE
“Touch your head and feel nothing but hair; touch your feet and feel nothing but nails.” Once again, this saying aptly described the situation Dukkar Tsering found himself in: he didn’t have a thing to his name. He was staggering back home from the county seat as though weighed down by a thousand-pound burden. And in fact, the tens of thousands of yuan he’d borrowed from the bank wasn’t just a thousand-pound burden to a poor nomad family like his, it was something that was of no benefit to him personally and did nothing to appease his creditors, either. Thinking of all this now, the young man who’d just turned thirty, his limbs all muscle, felt tears of remorse welling unstoppably at the corners of his eyes.
The tips of all sorts of plants were escaping from their prisons of ice and poking up through the soil, birds of all kinds were soaring in the sky singing their melodious tunes, and the air was pervaded by the earthy fragrance of soil. The glory of spring had arrived in the world of man. From some unknown source there came the love song of a young woman:
From the flocks that side of the Machu
I hear the cuckoo’s beautiful song,
and my heart is so happy.
From the tents this side of the Machu
I hear my sweetheart’s beautiful voice,
and my heart is so happy.
None of this, however, had any effect on Dukkar Tsering, who continued to press arduously onward, step after heavy step. All he could see was the symbols on mahjong tiles, and all he could hear was the clacking sound of the tiles being shuffled. What a horrible, despicable feeling! He bit his lip, tears once more welling at the corners of his eyes. His vision now blurred, he came to a halt and sat down on the ground.
I’m not a man. I can’t go home now. How can I show my face to my family … ah ho … what have I done … Dukkar Tsering beat his chest as he admonished himself. He felt a sudden craving for a cigarette and stuck his hand in his pocket, but he couldn’t even find a match, let alone a cigarette. Feeling even lower now, he hung his head and said to himself, Tens of thousands of yuan, gone again just like that? Impossible. I’m not a man, I’m a dog. Worse than a dog.
“Ah, kind sirs, I have asked you to come here today because my good-for-nothing bum of a son has been gambling again, and he’s lost tens of thousands. We’re all out of grain, and my daughter-in-law took the two kids and left. So … so I ask you all to please take pity on us—again.” Dukkar Tsering’s father opened the meeting with these preliminary remarks, although, bluntly put, they would be more accurately described as begging.
“But this time Dukkar Tsering needs to swear in front of all of us that he won’t gamble again. ‘A man won’t swallow his oath, and a dog won’t swallow metal.’ ”
“That’s right. It wasn’t just once or twice. If he keeps gambling like this he won’t just ruin your family, he’ll ruin our whole camp. He has to swear in front of all of us, right here and now, that he won’t gamble anymore. If he does that, then we’ll do whatever we can to help him again.”
“That’s right, that’s right …” The other members of the community voiced their complete agreement with the opinions of the two speakers.
Dukkar Tsering, who had been hanging his head since the start of the meeting, was left with no choice. “If I gamble again, then I’m not a man, I’m a dog,” he vowed, feebly.
The community persuaded Dukkar Tsering’s wife to come back home and bailed him out with donations: some gave a yak, some gave a dri, some gave a ram, and some gave a ewe. In the morning he herded them to the county seat, where he sold them for over thirty thousand yuan.
His original plan was to go straight to the bank and pay down at least half his debt, then go to the market and buy some grain, which he would transport back home with a rented tractor. Yet, as soon as the money was in his hands, he was pulled by a strange and irresistible force that wouldn’t allow him to go to the bank or to the grain market, a force that pulled him—without even giving him the chance to remember the business about the “man” and the “dog”—straight to a club run by a local police chief, where signs in Tibetan and Chinese on all four walls read “Gambling Prohibited.”
TWO
At dusk, a man riding a black horse caught up to Dukkar Tsering. It was Orgyen, an old man from their camp. Orgyen was over sixty years old, thin and dark skinned, and he wore a ragged fur-lined coat. He wasn’t a man anyone wanted to pay much attention to. “Is that Dukbhé? You look terrible. Have you been gambling again?”
This was the last thing Dukkar Tsering wanted to hear at that moment, and it made him feel both nervous and irritated. “No,” he snapped, offering the old man no other greeting. His attitude, however, already provided clear proof that Dukkar Tsering not only had been gambling but also had lost. Orgyen launched into an interminable lecture about the fate of opium smokers and gambling addicts in both the old and new societies, about how Dukkar Tsering used to be such a good boy and used to be so considerate to others before he fell under the spell of gambling, but now people wouldn’t class him in the rank of dogs, let alone the ranks of men, and so on and on.
Dukkar Tsering grew even more irritated. He halted, at the end of his tether now, and as he blankly looked Orgyen up and down he noticed the edges of a few bread cakes sticking out of the man’s pocket. His face turned pale and his body trembled. He realized that he hadn’t had a thing to eat since yesterday morning and was struck by a sudden and intense pang of hunger. Worse than that, he remembered how before he left for the county seat yesterday his eighty-year-old grandma had extracted a five-yuan note from beneath layers and layers of packaging, placed it in his hands, and instructed him to bring back a few bread cakes. When his older sister, who’d married into another community, had heard that he’d fallen into debt again, she’d come to help out, bearing some butter and cheese and leading two yaks. She had wailed bitterly the whole time, pleading repeatedly with him not to gamble anymore, and just before she left, she’d given that five-yuan note to his grandma.
Ah ho, what am I going to give to Grandma now? I’m not a man, I’m a dog. Worse than a dog …
Old man Orgyen was still advising and admonishing, but not a word of it was registering with Dukkar Tsering, whose eyes were still fixed like arrows on the bread cakes in Orgyen’s pocket. He thought, All I’d have to do is stick out my hand, pull the old man off the horse, press him to the ground, and wring his neck, just like that, and in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea those bread cakes would be mine! And if I were lucky he might have a good bit of money on him too. Yes, on the surface all he’s got is that ragged old fur coat, but don’t these types always skimp on their food and save on their drink, then end up hoarding loads of cash? Plus it’s the caterpillar fungus season now, and isn’t there a ton of it on his family’s land? Maybe he went to the county seat today to sell his caterpillar fungus. His train of thought having reached this juncture, he looked around and saw absolutely no one, not so much as a bird, on top of which it would be dark soon. All of a sudden his heart began to pound, he felt hot all over, and his whole body became moist with sweat.
And still Orgyen continued with his heartfelt words of advice and admonishment for Dukkar Tsering. From the look of it, he loved and cared for him as he would his own son. And, in fact, wasn’t it the old man and other kindhearted neighbors like him who had gotten Dukkar Tsering out from under his debt several times over, selflessly handing over the money earned with their own sweat and toil?
Ah kha, how could I be so ungrateful to those who’ve helped me? If I did it, I might get away with it in this life, but certainly not in the next, thought Dukkar Tsering, calming down, but again his previous thoughts came back to him. But how can I go back home empty handed
like this? How can I show my face to my family? What am I going to give to Grandma? Once more he looked around and saw that it was almost dark, and the horizon was fading from view. His heart began to pound again and he felt hot all over. His throat became dry and he found it hard to swallow …
THREE
At that moment a rabbit bounded out in front of them and tore off into the distance, startling Orgyen’s horse, which reared to the side with a snort. The old man, taken by surprise, was tossed from the horse’s back like a bird struck by an arrow. Just getting thrown from a horse isn’t all that serious, but unfortunately the old man’s right foot was caught in the stirrup and he was pulled to the underside of the animal, which startled it even more, and it flailed, reared, and spun around uncontrollably. The old man was tossed between the horse’s legs like an empty bag, and as the “bread cakes” in his pocket were thrown in all directions, it became apparent that they were actually wooden nose rings used for cattle. Seen from the edge, their shape and color made them look exactly like bread cakes.
As though he’d suddenly awakened from a terrible nightmare, Dukkar Tsering leaped forward and grabbed the reins, at which point the horse, snorting and quivering, fell still. The old man was groaning as he dangled by the horse’s belly, head to the ground and feet to the sky.
The Handsome Monk and Other Stories Page 15