They heard the sound of a motorbike pulling up outside. Not long after, Sangyé entered, followed by a middle-aged woman carrying a heavy saddlebag on her left shoulder; it was Yudrön, Sangyé’s younger sister. The region in which Yudrön lived hadn’t yet undergone “ecological resettlement.” Not only did her family not have to buy livestock products, they’d actually been able to sell some, and Yudrön, with great generosity, had even given some things away for free. It was for this reason that, every time she came to the county seat, she brought meat, butter, cheese, milk, yogurt, and other things besides for her brother’s family. This time too, she came bearing a whole rump of mutton, four pounds of wrapped-up yak offal, an eleven-pound block of butter, seven pounds of cheese in a black plastic bag, a plastic tub of yogurt, and two plastic bottles of milk. On top of all that, as she greeted Jamyang, Yangdzom, and Lhari Kyi, she gave each of them ten yuan.
Sangyé had also bought a few plastic bottles of the sugary soda they called “kow-lah” and seven pounds of yak meat. Ludrön set straight to chopping meat and kneading dough for dumplings. She put a generous heap of coal in the stove, and soon it was burning with a red flame that filled the room with warmth. They began to chat about this and that, and the sound of laughter, which had become a rarity, rang intermittently through the house. The troubles that had so burdened Sangyé and Ludrön only a few hours before, as well as the terrible things Lhari Kyi had told them about the school, were all seemingly forgotten. Jamyang was the first to turn in, followed shortly by Yangdzom with Lhari Kyi asleep in her arms. The others all stayed up for a good two hours past their normal bedtimes.
At the end of this joy-filled day, Sangyé went outside to relieve himself one last time, but was greeted by an unpleasant surprise. “Ah ho! Ah ho! My mow-tow! My mow-tow! Those thieving dogs, the thieving dogs …” he cried, pacing around the yard hopelessly looking for his missing motorbike.
TEN
The red-haired woman—as she was secretly referred to by the inhabitants of Happy Ecological Resettlement Village—came to Sangyé’s house to demand immediate payment of the electricity and water bills. If they didn’t pay, she told them, the electricity would be cut off and they wouldn’t be allowed to draw water.
Sangyé had grown in confidence of late, and his mood had also turned darker. Without a hint of fear, he responded, “When you pay me the pastures subsidy, I’ll pay the bills. Otherwise you can go ahead and cut off the electricity. I’ll use a solar generator. And if I’m not allowed to draw water, then we’ll just get it from the Tsechu River.”
The red-haired woman laughed. “Haha! Everyone knows the Tsechu is so wuran-ed that not even pigs will drink from it.”
Sangyé was about to retort when Ludrön unleashed a shrill, heart-rending cry and dashed forward three or four paces. She turned around, mouth agape, as though her spirit had left her body.
Sangyé swung around and saw Jamyang collapsed face down on the ground. He leaped forward and lifted Jamyang’s head, but the old man’s body had already turned cold.
According to Ludrön, her father had been sitting straight as a rod, and when she tugged at his sleeve to take him inside, he fell straight forward. When she touched his head it was as cold as a rock, scaring her out of her wits.
“I was sitting right next to him when he breathed his last. I couldn’t even raise his head. I couldn’t do a thing,” sobbed Ludrön.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry, recite manis, recite manis,” said Sangyé, trying to stop her tears.
“I couldn’t even get a cup of milk tea for him before he died. Not even a bite of tsampa with fresh butter. This morning he didn’t eat anything but a bit of plain black tsampa. My poor dad …” Ludrön wept even more bitterly than before. Unable to bear it, Sangyé began to cry too. It really was awful that he couldn’t manage to get his father-in-law a cup of tea or a bit of fresh butter before he passed, he thought. He felt ashamed at what a useless son-in-law he was. But it was no use having regrets. The best thing he could do for him now was to prepare the proper funeral rituals. Leaving Ludrön to mourn, he removed the inlaid saddle from the old piece of cloth in which it had been wrapped, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and prepared to head into town. But now he felt that he couldn’t just leave the two women alone with the body, so he set the saddle down on the ground. He went outside, and just as he did the couple from the family next door, having heard the cries, came to see what was going on.
“My father-in-law passed away, all of a sudden,” Sangyé told the husband. “Please, could I trouble you to stay with my wife and her mother for a bit while I go to town? I need to tell my family the news and see if I can find Alak Drong.” Picking up the saddle again, he turned to leave, but stopped in his tracks and came back as though he had just realized something. Slowly raising the coat covering the body, he saw the old man still clutching his prayer beads in his left hand and a prayer wheel in his right. He was about to remove them when his older neighbor stopped him. “Ah tsi ah tsi!” he exclaimed. “This is a pious man. I think it’s best if you leave them alone. If you want them removed, better to have a lama do it.” So Sangyé covered him with the coat once more.
“We by you’re used gods—best offer garanteed!” A sign in Tibetan filled with spelling mistakes hung outside the pawn shop, the letters resembling ant tracks in the dirt. After the owner had carefully examined each of the items brought by Sangyé—the saddle, stirrups, and other accessories—he raised a single finger, offering one wan—ten thousand yuan. Sangyé, misunderstanding, shook his head. “Well, how much money you want for it?” asked the owner in his crude Tibetan.
“Eight thousand.”
“Eight thousand?”
“Eight thousand.”
“Eight thousand. Eight thousand.” The owner shook his head, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and counted out the money.
Just as Sangyé left the pawn shop feeling quite pleased with himself, he saw Alak Drong getting out of a car. Rushing over, he told the lama that his father-in-law had suddenly passed away and beseeched him to pay a visit to his bedside. Much to his surprise, Alak Drong jumped back in the car, saying, “Come on then, let’s go!” This put Sangyé in a fluster. “Of course … but … we haven’t prepared anything … perhaps tomorrow …” Alak Drong barked his response as though he were issuing orders. “I’m going to Xining tomorrow. If you haven’t got a vehicle, then jump in my qiche!”
Fortunately, Sangyé got home to find that some of the former inhabitants of Tsezhung County who now lived in Happy Ecological Resettlement Village had been phoning around and were already gathered at his house. Without much trouble at all they helped Sangyé arrange a date for the funeral and other matters with Alak Drong.
Alak Drong said a few words to guide the consciousness of the deceased to its appropriate destination and prepared to leave. “Venerable Rinpoché, please look at this,” said one of the elderly neighbors, lifting up the fur coat to show him the beads and the prayer wheel clutched in the old man’s hands. Unfortunately, apart from asking why on earth they hadn’t removed those things from his hands, Alak Drong offered no other auspicious remarks.
ELEVEN
After the death of her husband, Yangdzom didn’t get out of bed until late in the day. She no longer watched TV like she used to. Instead, she would go outside and sit where her husband used to sit on the doorstep, and there she would stay, staring toward the main gate, just waiting for Lhari Kyi to come home from school. When Lhari Kyi did get home, she always had even more news to report than the TV. Sadly, it was always about utterly horrifying events. For instance, she had had two pieces of news the day before. The first was that a number of students who boarded at the school had gotten food poisoning. Although they were sent to the hospital, five of them were beyond help and died. The second was that one of those many coal trucks, which were as big as mountains and flowed like rivers, had hit a small car containing four people and squashed it as flat as a steel plate.
Every time
Yangdzom heard one of these stories she would close her eyes, clasp her hands to her chest, and offer a prayer: “By the Three Jewels, may all sentient beings be spared disasters like this.” But how could she know that just such a disaster was about to befall her own family? It was a freezing cold, frosty morning. Lhari Kyi had left for school earlier than usual and Yangdzom was still in bed. Sangyé and Ludrön were outside, ripping up an old sash into strips of cloth and stuffing them into the cracks in the walls. Sangyé’s mind wasn’t on the work in front of him; it was on the news he’d heard that a place in town was looking to hire a security guard. At some point they both felt an unsteadiness in their legs, and in that instant, the entire row of houses collapsed before their very eyes, sending a cloud of black dust into the air that blocked out everything. They stood rooted to the spot, completely stunned. Somewhere nearby a man ran past, yelling, “Earthquake! Earthquake!” The two of them finally came to their senses and, almost in unison, called out “Mother!” They clawed desperately at the tiles and bricks as if they’d lost their minds. When they lifted off some beams that had collapsed over the folded-up tent, Sangyé and Ludrön were overjoyed to find Yangdzom lying in the space underneath, not so much as a scratch on her. Barely able to believe their eyes, they helped her up, asking repeatedly if she was hurt. When they were finally convinced that it was real, they thanked the compassion of the Three Jewels over and over again. Just then they saw a man running past, wailing at the top of his voice. “Ah ho! Ah ho! The students have all been crushed to a pulp!” Once again, almost in unison, they called out “Lhari Kyi!,” jumped to their feet, and started to run.
To Yangdzom it seemed like a year, but in reality it was just an hour later that Sangyé returned, staggering as he held the lifeless, blood-soaked little body of Lhari Kyi. “Heaven is blind, heaven is blind …” he kept on moaning. Strangely, Ludrön didn’t weep as she had when her father died; she simply shed a few silent tears and sighed.
As they later learned, this was only a magnitude 4.0 earthquake. Except for the Ecological Resettlement Villages and a few schools, it hadn’t caused much damage. The government speedily arranged relief aid for those affected by the disaster in the form of emergency tents and food supplies. Not only did they provide compensation payments for the injured and the families of the dead, they promised that new houses would be built as soon as possible, even better and sturdier than the previous ones, and free of charge. The nomads were once again moved to tears of gratitude. But Sangyé’s family had long since lost the desire to live there. They had only continued to put up with it for the sake of Lhari Kyi’s schooling, but now that she was gone, there was no longer anything to keep them. And so, one morning, they hired a hand tractor and set off for Black Fox Valley.
The road home was clogged with those coal trucks that were as big as mountains and flowed like rivers, stirring up huge clouds of dust as they rushed back and forth, almost trampling—or rather flattening—the little tractor as they went. Ludrön, feeling even more dejected than before, rubbed her chest and sighed. It seemed that Sangyé too was feeling dejected. For the whole journey he plucked his moustache, not saying a word.
Since there were so many trucks, the tractor had to drive extremely slowly, and since they were driving so slowly, it wasn’t until almost sunset that they finally arrived at the mountain pass of Black Fox Valley. Then they were confronted with a sight even more shocking and incomprehensible than that of Lhari Kyi’s crushed little body. The entirety of Black Fox Valley had been dug up and turned into an expanse of pitch black. Everywhere you looked there were diggers, loaders, dump trucks, and tractors scurrying like ants from a nest, a seething maelstrom of activity. The roar of the machines sounded like a thousand thunderclaps booming at once.
So many new paths leading from the pass into the valley had appeared that the driver didn’t know which one to take, so he hit the brakes and waited for instructions from his passenger. But not only did his passenger fail to utter a sound, he even forgot to pluck his moustache. After a moment he regained his senses and began to look around, thinking they must have taken a wrong turn. But apart from the fact that the cairn and the prayer flags had turned black, everything was the same, confirming that no, they had not.
“Now I understand why the foxes in this valley are black,” Sangyé said.
Ludrön, who’d been silent the whole day, finally spoke. “So this is where all that expensive black rock comes from.”
* * *
1. A man who marries and moves in with his wife’s family.
15
NOTES OF A VOLUNTEER AIDS WORKER
Shoot, you don’t need to ask me(1) anything. I’ll tell you everything. Tell it straight. Every last detail. You can record what I say, then you can write it up and print the whole thing. You can even put my real name and where I used to work. I’ve ruined everything anyway, so I don’t need to worry about it anymore. My only hope is that people won’t follow in my footsteps.
I am the former head of the Economics and Trade Department of XX(2) Prefecture, XX Province. My name is XX. I’ve taken some “bosses”(3) to the whorehouse a few times, but I always used a condom, so there’s no way I got this damn disease from that. Shoot, so when did I get it? It was probably in 200X. Yeah, that it’s for sure—the National Day in October that year. Boss Zhang from Sichuan gave me a bribe of two hundred thousand yuan, and I gave him the project worth four million. He couldn’t have been happier, and he took me to the best restaurant in XX City. When we were playing mahjong he lost on purpose and gave me another 30,000-ish. After we’d had our fill of all the finest food and booze, he took me to a bathhouse. It was one of those places that’s called a bathhouse, but you don’t really go there for a wash, you go there for a prostitute. Shoot, there was this girl there—I picked her out from a lineup of three or four—she looked even younger than my youngest daughter. She was a sweet, beautiful thing, and best of all she had big, firm tits and a soft, round ass. From the look of her body, she seemed perfectly healthy. She said she was from up in the northeast, and judging from her fluent Mandarin, it seemed true. Either way, she was different from any girl, or prostitute, I’d met before. But I really don’t want to talk about that girl now. She took a shower, then she said, “Brother, you’re a handsome man, and you’re healthy looking too, so you don’t have to use a condom.”
That made me hesitate for a moment. “That guy you came in with said I had to do everything I could to satisfy you and make you happy,” she said with a grin; then she glued her lips to my crotch like a hungry baby presented with its mother’s breast and I completely forgot about the condom—and everything else. Shoot, who knew that one moment of pleasure would destroy my whole life, and even destroy my whole family line? So yes, it was that woman who infected me with this damn disease for sure.
About six or seven years later I got a fever and my joints started to ache. At first I thought it was just an ordinary flu and didn’t pay it much mind. But it got worse by the day, and the medicine and injections didn’t help in the least. Then I started to lose weight, and sores appeared all over my body. The doctors in that small town ran test after test but still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, so I had to go to the big hospital in the city. Shoot, it was there I finally discovered that “AIDS,” this damn disease that I’d barely heard of before, that I thought was vastly removed from me, that didn’t even have any connection to me at all, had, in fact, become a part of my body, and what’s more was in the process of killing me. For a while I didn’t believe it, and I went to an infectious diseases clinic to get a second opinion. Unfortunately, the results of their tests were exactly the same. Everything before my eyes turned dark gray and pitch black.…
It was then that I thought back and it finally occurred to me it was that bastard Boss Zhang who had thrown me into this fiery pit. And I finally realized that, even more than him, it was that goddamn prostitute who had thrown me into this hell. I was consumed by an overwhelming hatred of Bo
ss Zhang. I was consumed by an overwhelming hatred of that prostitute. Even more than them, I was consumed by an overwhelming hatred of myself. But it’s true what they say, “There’s nothing worse than regret.” I used to think that if you had status you had money, and if you had money then you had everything. I did whatever I could to take from my subordinates and give to my superiors and to strive to keep rising through the ranks. But I was completely wrong. Now I know that even if I were the dictator of my own country and had a mountain of gold at my disposal, it wouldn’t be the slightest bit of use.
Shoot, then my throat and genitals started to … well, I don’t need to tell you this, you’re an AIDS worker, you get the idea. Anyway, my body started showing all these unimaginable symptoms, and I felt pain like I can’t even describe. There was no cure anyway, so I thought about suicide, but it became clear to me that I had neither the means nor the will to kill myself. I finally realized that the family around me, even complete strangers, in fact everything in the whole world—the mountains and rivers, the plants, the houses and highways—it was all so beautiful and dear to me. But my physical and mental suffering still made me want to end it all, the sooner the better. I’m terrified of dying, but I’m even more terrified of living. I’m forever tormented by terrible hallucinations and nightmares. Sometimes I’m being hunted down by a bunch of cops with all these cutting-edge weapons, like the kind you see in the movies. Sometimes I get caught by gangsters; they hammer nails into my body and they cut my dick off, then they take off all my clothes and throw me into a huge square full of people. Sometimes my relatives, colleagues, doctors—even volunteers like you—grow five-foot tongues and ten-inch fangs, then peel off my skin, suck my blood, eat my flesh, and chew on my bones. Or they cut up my arms and legs and all my internal organs cell by cell, then use all these machines to do experiments and tests on them. Sometimes I’m in a deserted wilderness being chased by wild beasts, and they chase me and chase me until I fall into a bottomless abyss. I grab on to the branch of a tree but don’t have the strength to pull myself up, so I have to just hang there in midair. Sometimes a bunch of girls, their bodies oozing pus and blood all over, strip me naked; then, moaning, they kiss me everywhere and suck my dick.…
The Handsome Monk and Other Stories Page 19