Breakfast With Buddha (16 page)

And I said, “Okay, I hope I don’t have to call you again,” and we both laughed.

And there, tucked into a strip mall that bore the grand name of King James Plaza, was Little Budapest.

Unpromising.

Immediately inside the door we came upon a bulletin board, half a dozen pages posted there with snapshots and descriptions of houses for sale and some kind of a deal where you got two hundred dollars of food at Little Budapest
if you helped in the selling of one of them. CNN giving the news of the day to an empty bar—soldiers crouching as they ran past the black skeletons of bombed cars. Relief maps of Hungary on the wall. The skin of a wild boar. And a dozen black plastic tables with windows looking out on Semter Reach Road.

Not promising.

Rinpoche and I took a window table and were handed menus by a blond waitress whose voice seemed familiar. We opened the menus to a great variety of offerings from the banks of the Danube, everything from Transylvanian Cabbage to Veal Paprikash to Breaded Goose Liver. This made me happy. Just seeing these things written on a page made me happy.

When the waitress returned, Rinpoche asked for some noodles and a salad. I had already eaten the free appetizer of sliced cucumbers in vinegar with a garnish of sour cream and paprika and it had not made a dent in my hunger. So I ordered and ate chicken crepes in a cream and chicken broth sauce, with diced chicken and diced red and green peppers in the filling, the crepe itself light and perfectly made. Delicious Hungarian coffee with chocolate in it and whipped cream on top. Then a huge portion of lamb stew and mashed potatoes. And then, to finish, an apricot- and walnut-stuffed palascinta, which turned out to be a thin pancake stuffed with apricot-walnut cream.

I was at peace, the sour film of daytime TV washed from the lenses of my inner eye, the belly full, the road ahead promising only good things.

Rinpoche was smiling at me and patting his midsection in a way that seemed gently sarcastic.

“I know, I know. But the breakfast at the inn just wasn’t
enough for me, or not interesting enough. And it’s almost one o’clock.”

“Ah,” he said.

“The judgmental ah.”

He laughed.

“You have your meditation pleasure. I have my food pleasure.”

He laughed again.

“Your meditation pleasure lasted two hours. My food pleasure was what, twenty minutes? See how much more ascetic I am?”

“Ascetic?”

“Giving things up. Living the lean life.”

“Rinpoche could never give up his meditation.”

“Ah,” I said, and he laughed again.

“Rinpoche went three years without speaking. Two times.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his big head and reached across with a finger to scoop up the last dollop of the apricot cream. “Retreat.”

“Is that a tradition?”

He nodded. “Two years in prison eating kasha and bad bread and tea.”

“What did they arrest you for?”

“For being the son of my father. My father was a great, great Rinpoche, famous everywhere for as far as you could travel on a horse. A great teacher, and so . . . to jail.”

“Threatening to the powers that be,” I said.

“But why?” He seemed sorrowful.

“Do you miss your dad?”

“Father, mother. Very sad. My mother died when I was in the prison.”

“It’s hard when you don’t have a chance to say goodbye,” I said. “My parents died in a car crash. In February. No good-byes there either.”

“Yes, very hard,” he said. “When we go outside I show you something.”

I paid and thanked the waitress, stepped into the kitchen to get directions back to the highway from a heavy, happy man, and then found Rinpoche waiting on the sidewalk. He had been gardening again and held in one hand the kind of wide-bladed, lime-green grass that grows at the untended edges of sidewalks and lawns. He shook the dirt free, pulled out a half dozen of the longer strands, smoothed them, then twisted them into a flimsy green braid.

“Time,” he said, holding up the braid to me. He indicated one end, then the other, “Maybe one thousand year.” He touched the individual stalks of grass tenderly. “Souls. Spirits. You see? You, your father, your mother, sister, wife, children, you see? Your spirit is together with their spirits like this, tight against each other. That is why you were born into this wife together.” He pulled one strand out and tossed it up into the sunlight. “Maybe one of these people, or two, not so close after this wife. But people you really love, spirits that are close to your spirit, you see? They tie around tight to you, wife after wife.”

“
Life,
” I corrected him. “L.”

He paid no attention. “You see them, you live with them, you meet them now as son or daughter, next as mother or father, next as friend, maybe sometime as enemy, you see? You go through time with them.”

“A nice idea,” I said. “Comforting.”

And in response I received a hard look and felt the power in his eyes, in his being. It made me think of the power in
the hands of a gentle-seeming karate master, and in fact, at that moment, Rinpoche did poke me fairly roughly in the center of the chest with one finger. He glared at me fiercely for a three-count, then smiled. But this time the smile was only a thin coating of velvet over stone. “You have the good life,” he said harshly, emphasizing the
l
. “Easy life this time, Otto. Do not waste, okay?”

TWENTY

Well, I may not
be open-minded about the illogical and inexplicable, as my sister claims, but I have long had a great curiosity about what we call “coincidence.” You are thinking about a person you have not seen in years, and then, on that very day, the person calls; you dream of something, and that something happens the next afternoon. You are sitting in a bar in Manhattan with your young live-in girlfriend, broke and pretending not to be, without prospects, without patrons, your dream of life in the big city you love starting to fade, and just at that moment a man twice your age sits down nearby and orders a vodka martini, and you start talking to the man, and it turns out that he works as an editor for a well-respected publishing house in Manhattan, and they specialize in books about food, and you start to talk about how, in the city, even on a tight budget, you can eat pretty well, and you tell him you come from North Dakota, and the dining options in even four square blocks of Manhattan make you feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven, and the conversation goes on for an hour and at
the end of it the man takes a business card out of his wallet, says he happens to have an editorial assistant job just coming open, and it doesn’t pay much but the work isn’t that rough, and there are some good books coming in, and interesting authors, and if a person is really sincerely enthusiastic about food, it can help, and there might be a future in the publishing business. And so on.

Mere chance? Or the hand of fate, or karma, sketching dormers and trellises into the architecture of some grand plan? I have always wondered.

On the way out of Cleveland (or, I should say, on the way out of the far western reaches of the suburbs of Cleveland) there were a couple of small moments like that. Minor coincidences, really. I’d noticed that Oberlin, Ohio, was more or less on our route. A coworker’s daughter had gone to school there and liked it, and she sounded, from her mother’s description, a lot like Natasha. In the interest of future considerations, I thought we should make the ten-mile detour.

So, with thunderclouds gathering in great purple knobs above and to the west of us, I took the Oberlin exit. Here’s the first half of the coincidence: I happened, on this short drive from the interstate to Oberlin, to look up and see a street called Russian Road, on our right. And then, when we pulled into town past the green lawns of the college, we happened to park in front of a coffee shop called the Java Zone, and we decided to go in—Rinpoche for green tea, yours truly for iced coffee. It was quiet at that time of year, but you could imagine how, in the other three seasons, the tables would be occupied by students with their laptops and professors with their reading glasses and stacks of essays to grade. From what little we’d seen, the town looked to be a quintessential college town: quadrangles, classroom buildings,
and a couple of commercial streets lined with small shops. Natasha would love such a place, I thought.

The woman who served our drinks in Java Zone (Rinpoche was treating) had a thick accent, and soon Rinpoche was rattling on with her in a language I took to be Russian. I sorted out a “
dah
” and a “
nyet,
” remembered Russian Road. And then, as they went deeper into their conversation (the young woman seemed much taken with him), I wandered next door, where there was a combination department store and bookstore. In the spirituality section, on the middle shelf, just at eye-height, stood three thin volumes with the words
VOLYA RINPOCHE
on their spines. One was titled,
The Greatest Pleasure,
so I bought it, asked for a paper bag, and then, reason not clear to me, slipped it into the trunk of the car so the author would not see.

While I was waiting for Rinpoche to come back out of the Java Zone, I checked the map again and saw that Ohio Route 20 ran parallel to the interstate toward the Indiana border. There weren’t any large towns along it. We wouldn’t lose much time, taking that route, and I might be able to give Rinpoche a better sense of the American Midwest and give myself a respite from the highway madness.

He came out smiling, of course. When he was settling into the car he told me that the woman in the Java Zone had been from Irkutsk, which, in the scale of things, was not really all that far from Skovorodino—maybe two thousand miles—and she spoke what he called “clean Russian,” whereas Russian was actually his second language, as she could tell by his accent.

“What is your first language?”

“Ortyk.”

“Ortyk? Never heard of it.”

“The Ortyk people are my people. Descended from Mongolians, and before that, Tibetans.”

“Buddhists, then?”

“Not so much,” he said. “They were, what do you say? Close off? Close off from main lineage of Buddha’s teaching by big mountains there, and then by politics there, and they made their own lineage of teachers, and the teachers made their own way of thinking, their own practice, and so, now, to say Buddhists . . . not exactly right.”

“And you are part of this lineage?”

“Small part.”

“But you’re famous. You have books out.”

“I will give you one,” he said.

“No, I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll buy one.”

“There is a bookstore right there,” he said, pointing.

“No. I’ll buy one in South Bend. I’m sure there will be stores there, too. Which one should I read first?”

“For an advanced soul like you,” he said, “I think the best would be the one called
The Greatest Pleasure.
”

TWENTY-ONE

Ohio 20 proved
to be as flat as a Hungarian palascinta but interesting nonetheless. To the northwest, the clouds were angry and swirling, and we saw great spidery fingers of lightning flashing there. But the territory we traveled was untroubled. There were farms by the side of the road, uniform and flat and fertile, a sign at the edge of one field that read,
GET U.S. OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS
. The John Birch Society. On the radio, the so-called Christians were going on in stentorian tones about the spiritual decay of America.

I have to admit that I often agree with them. I have moments—watching wife and babysitter punch each other on daytime TV, or reading about two-year-olds left alone by crack-addicted moms, or hearing radio loudmouths fomenting hatred, or seeing thirty thousand dollars spent on our neighbors’ daughters’ sweet-sixteen parties while my sister’s friends in Paterson work for five dollars an hour—when I wonder if we have, in fact, started in on a moral decline that will end with our extinction, the flag in tatters being
run down the pole for the final time, the Great American Experiment lying in pieces like a beautiful broken vase, weakened from within and then smashed from without. But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.

Even so, as I mentioned, I have a sort of perverse fascination with the whole spectrum of talk-show nuts, and on the drive down Route 20 I made myself—and Rinpoche—listen to a long “Christian” call-in show. The host was ranting about the Sacred Sabbath and all the things you shouldn’t do on the Sacred Sabbath and all the people in this country who are “loathsome to the eye of God” because they don’t observe the Sacred Sabbath. Then the host started in on the righteousness of spanking, or “biblical corporal punishment,” as he called it. A caller wanted to know if it was appropriate to spank his fifteen-year-old daughter, who was straying from the Christian path, and put off by his “witnessing,” and did the host think it would be appropriate to render biblical corporal punishment to her?

The host thought that would be just fine. Spank on, my brother! So what if she’s fifteen? Toss her over your lap and spank on! In the name of Christ our Lord, amen.

Ordinarily, as we drove, especially when I had the radio on, Rinpoche would go into a kind of half-absent zone, studying the passing scenery, occasionally asking what a particular building might be used for, or how he should pronounce a name—Lido, Toledo. But on this drive he
seemed to be paying close attention to the prattle about punishment and hell and God. When it ended—in a long flurry of commercials for tapes, CDs, donations to keep the word of God alive—he turned to me with a perplexed expression on his face and said, “Why so angry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anger, anger. Why so much in America, tell me.”