A Year at River Mountain (15 page)

She stopped and faced me, her mouth open and hair blown loose, her breath rich with metal.

“Are you sick?”

“No. I am well.”

“You shouldn't be here. It's dangerous.”

With a quick gathering of clothes, she crouched to piss. Thin young bamboo poked through the snow, the leaves trembling. She stood, her belly a round taut curve. She turned to show me, to let me know, then refastened her clothes and laughed.

“Fine?” I said.

She nodded.

“I am in love with you.”

Let me sit still and concentrate. A war is without significance unless it comes ashore. The boat was slow, sailing upstream. Probably, it had a well-caulked hull, and supplies for a while. The family had lost everything, but soon they'd be safe.

H
OLD AND
S
UPPORT

The child was playing on the bridge deck with a wooden top while the father leaned, smoking, on the railing, the river charging and swirling just beneath their feet. They did not look at me.

I still don't know who this man is. He seems unconnected to the other villagers. He and his son arrived a month ago and we see them only occasionally. They keep to themselves, though I've seen the women give them food. I don't know where they sleep. This sighting comes the morning of my own son's birthday.

I woke up buoyed by joy — Song Wei's face, her eyes shining — then remembered the turmoil. And then I came upon the boy with his top, his narrow shoulders shifting as he made it spin and spin. Nothing can disturb the turning point if all else is fair, and if all is not fair disturbance will produce a wobble.

How can I blast out of the grand personal and live like a monk, each moment enough, despite mouth pain and the pull of Song Wei's eyes and the galloping signs of every imaginable disorder?

Stop the lens down and here's what you get: a darker world with sharper edges. I hated seeing myself in old footage — those boasting skinny nervous roles — so I avoided my early TV and movie work until I turned fifty. Then I watched each film, studied myself carefully to find the source of such youthful confidence and bravado.

Add time to the exposure and things are brighter and less stable: ghosts appear and buildings are less solid. Uphill the temple, surrounded by snow, snow thick on its roof, seems hefty and beautiful against the white mountain.

Frank's hands were shaking when he turned from releasing the timber to sound the midmorning bell, the tremor touching his whole frame before the echo reached the two of us on the mound above the spring. The noise prevented him from hearing my presence, but he was smiling as he shuffled over the trampled snow. I shouldn't have been there since no one must witness the bell struck, but I hadn't spoken to him in weeks. It was clamorous on the stone hill, the waves tolling back and forth across the valley, the yellow sky curdled. Below us, beyond the temple and storehouse, people were industrious, their lives visible just ahead of their bladelike bodies. How slowly they advanced in the pure land. How certainly.

“Frank.”

“It's you. How was your trip?”

“The master is pleased.”

“Good.”

“How are you?”

“Good for an old guy. What d'you want?”

“Just to say hello.”

“Well, then.”

“There's trouble this winter.”

“There is.”

“May I shake your hand?”

“Of course.” He thrust out his arm.

Through my fingers I felt the quick passage of life through his body. I set a finger on Back Ravine and his body undulated like a herringbone sky. Then I left him on his summit, and wound my way down the path to the spring. Splinters of ice surrounded the clear black water under the pine branches.

As I passed the temple, the silver pond blinded me, ducks skating the surface.

Frank is back in our world. He showed up in the storehouse, wild with talk, to register us with arched eyebrows and body tremors. He said the bell was no longer haunted. He had listened to the ghosts.

This afternoon he visited my corner of the storehouse to speak about America. He stood wavering, his hand light on my arm, gazing off into the books, and told me about a horse he once worked with, its smell, its threadbare coat and low voice, the thud of its heart.

“I am in love,” I said.

He waved his hand. “What does the master know about the fighting?”

“He hasn't told us.”

At the open door we listened to wind in the bamboo.

“That old lame horse locked her legs in front of me and her breath was sweet and loud, and she just died.”

I walked him outside and watched him pick his way carefully uphill, and a short time later I heard the bell and saw my son walking away down a grey street. I loved and lost him. Imogen. Song Wei. Her baby. Frank's bells are a sonic support for all of this.

G
ATE OF
A
BUNDANCE

Another windstorm. Sporadic artillery at night. More boats. The valley a concoction of curving energies, the scorpion tail of spring, yang beating on yin, our fires guttering. Outside the storehouse door are epic clouds and on the bridge gulls, the first this winter, snow blowing in from the south. Last night I slept only a few hours, and woke amazed at the difference between my life now and my life then. My earliest adult memory is the one of being dropped off by my mother on the freeway, nothing in my pockets, sleeping in a ditch and waking at dawn covered in volcanic ash to birds and the quiet highway, believing the world dead, until the day's first traffic proved me wrong.

What is your earliest memory?

Surely not driving a Fiat sedan across a ravine on a derelict rail trestle one summer in shrub country north of the desert, a kid in the back seat, bumping over square timbers, a blue lake far below?

No. This was my small family. Before the real acting began, before you caught my eye, and before the raising of a child. Before debt and waiting and everything.

F
LOATING
C
LEFT

Each day was a single fluid gesture. Then when I realised you were real, I lay curled up on the floor for hours at a time in long depression, until there came a kind of itch only you could scratch, and the succession of great roles. But I never arrived where I believed I was going; your fault, audience member, witness, reader, judge. I'm still not where I think I am and I'm still reaching out to you.

My forebears shift uneasily among the valley ghosts and twisting storms, kicking stones in their panic.
Where are we?
This is water's home, I tell them.
And where is that?
Water's home is a warren of passages under the Milky Way.
The Milky Way?

Snow hisses through the open doorway, melting on the platform, but not on the cold packed earth. Hypnotic snowflakes, fat white bees, slow and change direction. Dark birds flash among the flakes, vanish in the trees.

A child is missing. We must go out while the snow is still falling. Zhou Yiyuan came, half-crazy, to the storehouse, and said his sister was bleeding and she could not stand up and a child was lost, a girl, her footsteps before they were covered following the path beyond the temple.

I have been through North Gate and a little way up the mountain. Wind screaming in the trees. Huge gusts flinging snow and branches in our faces. We found the girl, not quite dead, almost buried in snow, under the heavy branch of a tree. Snow had blown against her back. Her face, turned to the base of the tree, was a bruise in all that white. What I once would have called a miracle. I helped carry her down to the village, exhilaration pumping my blood, where Zhou Yiyuan pressed my hands and said all was well.

Now the girl is sleeping and I can't feel my feet. I am very cold. When I shut my eyes there's an afterimage of swarming flakes. Song Wei is fine, the unborn baby too, although there was blood. So Zhou Yiyuan may be trusted. What a confluence of inexplicable things.

Listen to them singing, these villagers I know nothing about, as little as I know about the river. They say once it has entered the sea it ascends in a Great Goodbye, turning back the way it came as a river of stars.

O
UTSIDE THE
C
ROOK

The countryside is still. Then a bird lifts from a branch and flies through a spray of snow, and I find a white feather buried quill up. Shooting pains in my fingers from hauling disks of ice from the water barrels.

It must be beauty, what aches in my feet and hands. The pain is blood. Life coming slowly home. Another return. Stars in the sky, now through the trees, now starlight through the earth.

M
IDDLE OF THE
C
ROOK

The child has gone wild. After sleeping for a day, she vanished again, her tracks again leading through North Gate and up the mountain. The first rescue party had to return because this time she'd climbed quickly and had already gone beyond where we'd found her last. Monks with supplies and ropes were sent out but by late afternoon had not returned. The master gathered us above the temple as light faded, in the small cut between the bell mound and the gate. Footprints showed every monk's passage, a crazy history. At our feet, the spring was frozen and the land outside the gate looked dark and frightening.

“She is not lost,” he said. He coughed for a moment. “There are valleys so steep and dark that only hermit monks have seen them.” He waited, pale and silent, his robes flapping against his thin ankles. “These valleys can't be found by those who seek them.”

This evening a half-moon lit the snow and I sat with Song Wei by the fire in her brother's shack, listening to distant guns, all guilt and fever because I did not join the searchers on the mountain; because I had not written to Imogen; because I had nothing to tell the master.

Now they say there are three fronts to the conflict, though a ceasefire is being negotiated, underwritten by the arrival of international forces. I remember it was in Kitsilano looking over to the North Shore that I became aware that mountains would outlast the fever (call it loneliness, call it heartbreak, call it commerce) that drives humans to the snowline.

A
TTACHED
B
RANCH

The terraces are frozen. My fingers can't hold the pen. My left hand aches. It's a wrinkled and spotted thing with grey skin pouched at the knuckles. Snow has not fallen since the day before yesterday and the temperature has risen enough to thaw the south-facing fronts of the temple and storehouse. The pine forest is loud with shouting crows. By day the sun shines and great icicles hang from the roofs.

The party came home without the child. The village men are silent, the women praying. Two fresh monks have left to try to find her body before the next snowfall.

D
OOR OF THE
C
ORPOREAL
S
OUL

The master has retired to his room. All morning we worked outside, often glancing up toward Mountain Temple, expecting two exhausted figures, one burdened with the body of a child, then in the afternoon we began to catalogue the old records. Many are damaged by mice or by water. All the storehouse braziers were lit, despite the sun, and we luxuriated in the heat. My feet and hands at last felt warm.

This evening old monks recounted the ancient war between the North and South, when the last armies of the South were hunted by a union of Northern chieftains to a remote valley near the end of the empire, where they rallied around a young prince who had been wounded in the foot. Almost no one survived the long final battle, which took place nearby, though the location is widely contested.

V
ITAL
R
EGION
S
HU

Warm wind howls all day, unnaturally steady. The master is sick. The girl is lost. We sense unbearable tension on the plains south. It is impossible to imagine spring. We have an unnameable debt to pay and warlords are parking their Jeeps on the far side of the bridge.
Another chorus of slamming car doors.

The mind's complexity confounds me. Once, at a film festival in Italy, I walked out of a panel discussion, furious at the stupidity of the audience's questions (not yours, no, though you were certainly there) and their aggressive fawning, and went to the little kiosk in the square to buy cigarettes. On this soft blue day the tobacco, rich and dark, was the best I had ever tasted. I abandoned myself to the beautiful light and walked uphill from the piazza into the old town where, on a cliff above the harbour, was an ancient buttressed church, the drop sheer from its pitted south wall. The church door, at the top of a flight of worn stone steps, was scarred and crisscrossed with iron, an immense dam: each surface detail worthy of a lifetime's study. I stood, out of breath, finishing my third cigarette, festival organisers and fellow panellists in stuffy halls below me. What good is an assemblage of such moments, even if they fasten old habits to the present? What are these clues good for?

Buds on whipping branches, birds wheeling everywhere, and the villagers leaving hourly offerings at the shrines. What? What are we unready for?

S
PIRIT
H
ALL

The snow is thinner. The world is blown to shreds. One cannot live in a state of wind. Wind-anxiety feeds fear, and fear goes into rage, into revenge, unless it is channelled toward ritual and order. Let me concentrate. The heart is heavy, therefore the girl must be dead. Therefore the baby . . . Let me check my conscience. Let me reach below it into tarry shame. The girl broke free of the home valley that keeps us safe. We have not done enough. The world without Song Wei is grey, and snow, already thinner, cannot survive this salty wind. The oceans it came from are ordered into ranks of fishes waiting to be caught.

But then I see Song Wei on the path to East Shrine and know the girl will be recovered, the baby will live, and the white valley, smoke from our fires flying over the river, is only beautiful.