“Five trees in one,” repeated the newspaper man.
“I admit, the apples are tart. But that’s nothing. The Tree talks!”
“Really?”
He left soon afterwards. He wrote his stupid story, anyway, inventing my every word. A monk read it out to me. Apparently I had always admired Deng Xiaoping’s enlightened leadership. I’d never even heard of Tiananmen Square, but apparently I believed the authorities responded in the only possible way.
I added “writers” to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
“Do you know who I am?”
I open my eyes.
The leaf shadows of my Tree dapple her beautiful face.
“The lilies in your hair, my darling, they suited you. Thank you for your letter. It came just the other day. A monk read it to me.”
She smiled the way she does in the photograph.
“This is your great-granddaughter,” says my niece, as though I’m making a mistake.
My niece is the mistaken one, but I’m too tired to explain the nature of yesterdays.
“Have you returned to China for good, my darling?”
“Yes. Hong Kong is China now, anyway. But yes.”
There is pride in my niece’s voice. “Your great-granddaughter has done very well for herself, Aunt. She’s bought a hotel and restaurant in the Village. There’s a spotlight on the roof that turns around and around, all through the night. All the rich people from the city come there to stay. A film star stayed only last week. She’s had a lot of good offers of marriage—even the local Party Chief wants her hand.”
My heart curls up, warm, like a tame mountain cat in the sun. My daughter will honor me as an ancestor, and bury me on the Holy Mountain, facing the sea. “I’ve never seen the sea, but they say Hong Kong is paved with gold.”
She laughs, a pretty laugh. I laugh, too, to see her laughing, even though it makes my ribs ache and ache.
“You can find a lot of things on Hong Kong’s pavements, but not much gold. My employer died. A foreigner, a lawyer with a big company, he was extremely wealthy. He was very generous to me in his will.”
With the intuition of an old dying woman, I know she isn’t telling the whole truth.
With the certainty of an old dying woman, I know it’s not the truth that much matters.
I hear my daughter and niece making tea downstairs. I close my eyes, and hear ivory hooves.
A ribbon of smoke uncoils as it disappears, up, up, and up.
MONGOLIA
THE GRASSLANDS ROSE and fell past the train, years upon years of them.
Sometimes the train passed settlements of the round tents that Caspar’s guidebook called gers. Horses grazed, old men squatted on their haunches, smoking pipes. Vicious-looking dogs barked at the train, and children watched as we passed. They never returned Caspar’s wave, they just looked on, like their grandfathers. Telegraph poles lined the track, forking off to vanish over the restless horizon. The large sky made Caspar think of the land where he had grown up, somewhere called Zetland. Caspar was feeling lonely and homesick. I felt no anticipation, just endlessness.
The Great Wall was many hours behind us now.
A far-flung, trackless country in which to hunt myself.
Sharing our compartment was a pair of giant belchers from Austria who drank vodka by the pint and told flatulent jokes to one another in German, a language I had learned from Caspar two weeks before. They were betting sheaves of Mongolian currency—togrugs—on a card game called cribbage one of them had learned from a Welshman in Shanghai, and swearing multicolored oaths. In the top bunk sat an Australian girl called Sherry, immersed in War and Peace. Caspar had been an agronomist at university before dropping out and had never read any Tolstoy. I caught him wishing he had, though not for literary reasons. A Swede from the next compartment invited himself in from time to time to regale Caspar with stories of being ripped off in China. He bored us both, and even Caspar’s sympathies were with the Chinese. Also in the Swede’s compartment was a middle-aged Irish woman who either gazed out of the window or wrote numbers in a black notebook. In the other neighboring compartment was a team of four Israelis—two girlfriends and their boyfriends. Other than chatting politely with Caspar about hostel prices in Xi’an and Beijing, and the new bursts of violence in Palestine, they kept themselves to themselves.
Night stole over the land again, dissolving it in shadows and blue. Every ten or twenty miles tongues of campfire licked the darkness.
Caspar’s mental clock was several hours out, so he decided to turn in. I could have adjusted it for him, but I decided to let him sleep. He went to the toilet, splashed water over his face, and cleaned his teeth with water he disinfected in a bottle with iodine. Sherry was outside our compartment when he came back, her face pressed against the glass. Caspar thought, How beautiful. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello.” Sherry’s eyes turned towards my host.
“How’s the War and Peace? I have to admit, I’ve never read any Russians.”
“Long.”
“What’s it about?”
“Why things happen the way they do.”
“And why do things happen the way they do?”
“I don’t know, yet. It’s very long.” She watched her breath mist up the window. “Look at it. All this space, and almost no people in it. It almost reminds me of home.”
Caspar joined her at the window. After a mile had passed: “Why are you here?”
She thought for a while. “It’s the last place, y’know? Lost in the middle of Asia, not in the east, not in the west. ‘Lost as Mongolia,’ it could be an expression. How about you?”
Some drunk Russians up the corridor groaned with laughter.
“I don’t really know. I was on my way to Laos, when this impulse just came over me. I told myself there was nothing here, but I couldn’t fight it. Mongolia! I’ve never even thought about the place. Maybe I smoked too much pot at Lake Dal.”
A half-naked Chinese toddler ran up the corridor, making a zun-zun noise which may have been a helicopter, or maybe a horse.
“How long have you been traveling?” asked Caspar, not wanting the conversation to lag.
“Ten months. You?”
“Three years, this May.”
“Three years! Oath, you are a terminal case!” Sherry’s face turned into a huge yawn. “Sorry, I’m bushed. Being cooped up doing nothing is exhausting work. Do you think our Austrian friends have shut up the casino for the night?”
“I only hope they have shut up the joke factory. You don’t know how lucky you are, not speaking German.”
Back in their compartment, the Austrians were snoring in stereo. Sherry bolted the door. The gentle sway of the train lulled Caspar towards sleep. He was thinking about Sherry.
Sherry peered over the bunk above him. “Do you know a good bedtime story?”
Caspar was not a natural storyteller, so I stepped in. “I know one story. It’s a Mongolian story. Well, not so much a story as a sort of legend.”
“I’d love to hear it,” Sherry smiled, and Caspar’s heart missed a gear.
There are three who think about the fate of the world.
First there is the crane. See how lightly he treads, picking his way between the rocks in the river? Tossing and tilting back his head. The crane believes that if he takes just one heavy step, the mountains will collapse and the ground will quiver and trees that have stood for a thousand years will tumble.
Second, the locust. All day the locust sits on a pebble, thinking that one day the flood will come and deluge the world, and all living things will be lost in the churn and the froth and black waves. That is why the locust keeps such a watchful eye on the high peaks, and the rain clouds that might be gathering there.
Third, the bat. The bat believes that the sky may fall and shatter, and all living things die. Thus the bat dangles from a high place, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, chec
king that all is well.
That was the story, way back at the beginning.
Sherry had fallen asleep, and Caspar wondered for a moment where this story had come from. I closed his mind and nudged it towards sleep. I watched his dreams come and go for a little while. There was a dream about defending a gothic palace built on sand flats with pool cues, and one about his sister and niece. His father entered the dream, pushing a motorbike down the corridor of the Trans-Siberian express with a sidecar full of money that kept blowing away. Drunk and demanding as ever, he asked Caspar what the devil he thought he was playing at, and insisted that Caspar still had some very important videotapes. Caspar had become a half-naked little boy and knew nothing about them.
My own infancy was spent at the foot of the Holy Mountain. There was a dimness, which I later learned lasted many years. It took me that long to learn how to remember. I imagine a bird beginning as an “I.” Slowly, the bird understands that it is a thing different from the “It” of its shell. The bird perceives its containment, and as its sensory organs begin to function it becomes aware of light and dark, cold and heat. As sensation sharpens, it seeks to break out. Then one day, it starts to struggle against the gluey gel and brittle walls, and cannot stop until it is out and alone in the vertiginous world, made of wonder, and fear, and colors, made of unknown things.
But even back then, I was wondering: why am I alone?
The sun woke Caspar. He had dried tears in his eyes and his mouth tasted of watch straps. He badly wished he had some fresh fruit to eat. And the Austrians had already beaten him to the bathroom. He slid out of bed, and we saw Sherry was meditating. Caspar pulled on his jeans and tried to slip out of the compartment without disturbing her.
“Good morning, and welcome to Sunny Mongolia,” Sherry murmured. “We get there in three hours.”
“Sorry I disturbed you,” said Caspar.
“You didn’t. And if you look in that plastic bag hanging off the coat hook, you should find some pears. Have one for breakfast.”
“So,” said Sherry, four hours later. “Grand Central Station, Ulan Bator.”
“Strange,” said Caspar, wanting to express himself in Danish.
The whitewash was bright in the pristine noon sun. The never-silent wind blew on over the plains, into the vanishing point where the rails led. The signs were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which neither Caspar nor any of my previous hosts knew. Chinese hawkers barged off the train, heaving bags of goods to sell, shouting to one another in familiar Mandarin. A couple of listless young Mongolians on military service fingered their rifles, thinking of where they would rather be. A group of steely old women were waiting to get on the train, bound for Irkutsk. Their families had come to see them off. Two figures hovered in the wings, in black suits and sunglasses. Some youths sat on a wall, looking at the girls.
“I feel like I’ve climbed out of a dark box into a carnival of aliens,” said Sherry.
“Sherry, I know, erm, as a young lady, you have to be careful of whom you trust when you’re traveling, but, I was wondering—”
“Stop sounding like a Pom. Yes, sure. I won’t jump you if you don’t jump me. Now. Your Lonely Planet says there’s a halfway decent hotel in the Sansar district, at the eastern end of Sambuu Street.… Follow me.…”
I let Sherry take care of my host. One less thing for me to worry about. The Austrians said good-bye and headed off to the Kublai Khan Holiday Inn, no longer laughing. The Israeli team nodded at us and marched off in another direction. Caspar had already forgotten about the Swede.
Backpackers are strange. I have a lot in common with them. We live nowhere, and we are strangers everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. We are both parasites: I live in my hosts’ minds, and sift through their memories to understand the world. Caspar’s breed live in a host country that is never their own, and use its culture and landscape to learn, or to stave off boredom. To the world at large we are both immaterial and invisible. We chew the secretions of solitude. My incredulous Chinese hosts who saw the first backpackers regarded them as quite alien entities. Which is exactly how humans would regard me.
All minds pulse in a unique way, just as every lighthouse in the world has a unique signature. Some minds pulse consistently, some erratically. Some are lukewarm, some are hot. Some flare out, some are very nearly not there. Some stay on the fringe, like quasars. For me, a roomful of animals and humans is like a roomful of suns, of differing magnitudes and colors, and gravities.
Caspar, too, has come to regard most people as blips on a radar. Caspar is as lonely as me.
“Did I blink?” remarked Sherry. “Where’s the city? Beijing was a city, Shanghai was a city. This is a ghost town.”
“It’s like East Germany in the Iron Curtain days.”
Ranks and files of faceless apartment blocks, with cracks in the walls and boards for windows. A large pipeline mounted on concrete stilts. Cratered roads, with only a few dilapidated cars trundling up and down. Goats eating weeds in a city square. Silent factories. Statues of horses and little toy tanks. A woman with a basket of eggs stepping carefully between the broken flagstones and smashed bottles and wobbling drunks. Streetlights, ready to topple. A once-mighty power station spewing out a black cloud over the city. On the far side of the city was a gigantic fairground wheel that Caspar and I doubted would ever turn again. Three westerners in black suits walked by. Caspar thought they were in the wrong place and time.
Ulan Bator was much bigger than the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain, but the people we saw here lacked any sense of purpose. They just seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something to open, for the end of the day, for their city to be switched on, or just waiting to be fed.
Caspar readjusted the straps on his backpack. “My Secret History of Genghis Khan did not prepare me for this.”
That night Caspar dug into his mutton and onion stew with relish. He and Sherry were the only diners in the hotel, which was actually the sixth and seventh floors of a crumbling apartment building.
The woman who had brought the food from the kitchen looked at him blankly. Caspar pointed at it, gave her a thumbs-up sign, smiled, and grunted approvingly.
The woman looked at Caspar as though he were a madman, and left.
Sherry snorted. “She’s about as welcoming as the customs woman at the border.”
“One of the things that my years of wandering have taught me is, the more impotent the country, the more dangerous its customs officials.”
“When she showed us the room she gave me a look like I’d run over her baby with a bulldozer.”
Caspar picked out a bit of fleece from a meatball. “Service-sector communism. It’s quite a legacy. She’s stuck here, remember. We can get out whenever we want.”
He had some instant lemon tea from Beijing. There was a flask of hot water on the sideboard, so he made a cup for himself and Sherry, and they watched the waxy moon rise over the suburb of gers and campfires. “So,” began Caspar. “Tell me more about that Hong Kong pub you worked in. What was the name?
Mad Dogs?”
“I’d rather hear more stories of the weirdos you met during your jewelry-selling days in Okinawa. Go on, Vikingman, it’s your turn.”
So many times in a lifetime do my hosts feel the beginnings of friendship. All I can do is watch.
As my infancy progressed, I became aware of another presence in “my” body. Stringy mists of color and emotion condensed into droplets of understanding. I saw, and slowly came to recognize, gardens, paths, barking dogs, rice fields, sunlit washing drying in warm town breezes. I had no idea why these images came when they did. Like being plugged into a plotless movie. Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path.
Something was happening on my side of the screen of perception, too. Like a radio slowly being turned up, so slowly that at first you cannot be sure of it being there. Slowly, I felt an e
ntity that was not me generating sensations, which only later could I label loyalty, love, anger, ill-will. I watched this other clarify, and pull into focus. I began to be afraid. I thought it was the intruder! I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg that would hatch and drive me out. So one night, while my host was asleep, I tried to penetrate this other presence.
My host tried to scream but I would not let him wake. Instinctively, his mind made itself rigid and tight. I prised my way through, clumsily, not knowing how strong I had become, ripping my way through memories and neural control, gouging out great chunks. Fear of losing the fight made me more violent than I ever intended. I had sought to subdue, not to lay waste.
When the morning brought the doctor he found my first host unresponsive to any form of stimulus. Naturally, the doctor could find no injury on the patient’s body, but he knew a coma when he saw one. In southwest China in the 1950s there were no facilities for people with comas. My host died a few weeks later, taking any clues of my origin that may have been buried in his memories with him. They were hellish weeks. I discovered my mistake—I had been the intruder. I tried to undo some of the damage, and piece back together some of the vital functions and memories, but it is so much easier to destroy than it is to re-create, and back then I knew nothing. I learned that my victim had fought as a brigand in bad times or a soldier in good ones in northern China. I found fragments of spoken languages which I would later know as Mongolian and Korean, but he had been illiterate. That was all. I couldn’t ascertain how long I had been embryonic.
I assumed that if my host died, I would share his death. I turned all my energies to learning how to perform what I now call transmigration. Two days before he died, I succeeded. My second host was the doctor of my first. I looked back at the soldier. A middle-aged man lay on his soiled bed, stretched out on his frame of bones. I felt guilt, relief, and I felt power.