by John Boyne
My wife and son had been dead for eight months, and I had been in Swayambhunath for seven, when Girvesh arrived. He was little more than a boy when I opened the gate at his knock and, upon first seeing him, I did my best to conceal my shock at the sight of the scars that disfigured his slight body, deep, pitted burn marks that marred his forehead, cheeks, neck and arms. Some emerged like pernicious lumps upon his flesh, while others appeared taut, stretching the skin so tightly that it seemed almost translucent. When my eyes made contact with his, he lowered his gaze toward the ground and wrapped his arms around his chest, as if he wanted to squeeze himself into irrelevance. Here, I could tell, was a boy who did all that he could to remain invisible in the world, hiding his damaged countenance from anyone who crossed his path. He had come to the monastery, I guessed, to escape disgusted eyes.
To my surprise, however, before I could even utter a word of welcome, he fell to his knees and threw his arms out before him, a study in entreatment.
“Most revered holy man,” he cried, the words tumbling out of him so quickly it was obvious that he had been rehearsing them. “Take pity on a weary supplicant who has been much injured by this cruel world and grant me the shelter of your monastery!”
“I am not a monk,” I replied, reaching down to pull him to his feet. “Nor am I revered or holy. Quite a long way from both, in fact.” He looked up at me then and, despite his many mutilations, it was impossible not to be struck by the beauty and innocence that lay behind his pale blue eyes. For someone so young, it seemed that he had already suffered untold agonies. “Tell me, though, what is your name?”
“Girvesh,” he replied, and after offering my own, I invited him to follow me inside, closing the gate behind us. The sense of relief that emanated from him as he glanced around was tangible, his face filling with delight as he took in the magnificent stupa that stood at the heart of the monks’ site and the temples and shrines surrounding it. My intention was to bring him directly to the office of Holy Faneel, as I had once been brought, for it was he who would decide whether Girvesh would be permitted to stay or not, but as I walked toward the entrance of that building, I saw the abbot sitting on the grass nearby in the company of some of the younger monks, all of whom were engaged in sound meditation as a small fountain trickled an endless supply of water into a pond.
I indicated to Girvesh that we should sit together until their prayers were completed and, as we took up the lotus position on the grass, I noted how badly swollen were his feet and wondered how long he had been walking, and from what great distance he had come.
It was a hot afternoon and as the sun beat down upon our heads, a half-dozen rhesus monkeys swung in the trees above us, chattering and whooping cheerfully. I had grown accustomed to their presence, for a large population of these mischief-makers lived peaceably among us in the temple and on the land. When one dropped a handful of nuts on the ground, he leaped down, landing at Girvesh’s feet, and stared directly into the boy’s face while scratching the underside of his chin, as if he was trying to decide whether this newcomer was worth conversing with or not. Girvesh laughed in boyish delight, turning to me with real pleasure on his face, and in that moment, he seemed even younger than I had originally taken him for.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“I have suffered fourteen birthdays,” he replied. “Each one worse than the one before.”
“And from where have you traveled?”
He hesitated for a moment before answering, as if uncertain about betraying too many of his secrets to a stranger. “Bharatpur,” he said. “In the west. I walked all the way here. It has been a very painful journey, very painful indeed.”
I glanced down at his feet again. As well as looking bloated, they were filthy with mud, cuts and blisters.
“I’d also traveled a great distance on foot when I first arrived in this place,” I told him. “But in my cell, I have a small bowl filled with a white paste, infused with the scent of lavender and the aloe vera plant, and this will soothe your injured feet and bring the swelling down. After you have spoken to Holy Faneel, I will attend to your wounds.”
He looked at me gratefully and massaged his toes with his fingers. A few minutes later, perhaps disturbed by our whispered conversation, Holy Faneel ended his prayers and rose, walking over to us with his hands held wide apart in a gesture of welcome. I stood up, as did Girvesh, and we bowed to each other, as I explained that I had discovered the boy at the gates and that he had come seeking our help.
“Are you running away from someone?” asked Holy Faneel, and the boy shook his head.
“I have no home,” he said, a note of anxiety in his tone, for the abbot could be an intimidating figure in his red robe and jewelry, the six entwined peacocks of his shawl proving both daunting and hypnotic.
“Your mother?”
“Dead. The hour I came into the world was the hour she departed it.”
“And your father?”
He hesitated now, briefly.
“Killed in the Bharatpur riots,” he said. “There was nothing left for me then so I visited the temple and prayed to Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha for advice. Soon, a voice called out to me in the darkness and said that I should come here. To Swayambhunath.”
Holy Faneel smiled but raised an eyebrow, looking skeptical. “You heard his voice?” he asked quietly. “The voice of the Buddha himself?”
“I believe so, yes,” replied Girvesh nervously.
“Our friend here is skeptical about such things,” he said, nodding in my direction. “He’s not even convinced that the Buddha truly exists. And yet, when he was encouraged to spend a week alone in prayer to the sage of the Shakya clan for the return of his speech, he emerged able to converse as other men do.”
Holy Faneel offered me a half-smile and I had the good grace to look discomfited. After months of feigning muteness, I had taken the opportunity offered by the monks’ idea of a retreat of pure supplication to speak again, pretending to have emerged with my voice restored, but I had never been fully convinced that the abbot believed that it had been a gift from the prophet so much as a conscious decision on my part.
“Such a thing happened?” asked Girvesh, turning to me with a look of horror on his face, as if he had never heard of anything quite so heretic.
“It was a miracle,” I replied.
“And yet you still question His presence in our lives?”
“I question everything, my young friend. I continually seek answers, as do all here.”
“Don’t worry, boy,” continued Holy Faneel, placing a hand upon his shoulder. “He may not be a believer as yet, but he has been welcomed into our community and is, I hope, benefitting from his time here. You, too, will be welcomed if you feel that our temple has something to offer you. Is that what you want?”
“Very much,” he replied.
Holy Faneel nodded, satisfied, and turned back to me, giving me instructions to take the boy to one of the guest rooms, which I did, and where we discovered four more monkeys lying on the empty mattress, enjoying the peace of the afternoon.
“They’re considered holy in these parts,” I told him as he sat down on the edge of the bed, and I retrieved the mixture I had spoken of, adding some clove oil, sage and mustard seeds, before massaging it into his tender young feet. He sighed in pleasure as the herbs blended into the broken skin, offering some much-needed relief. “So you would do well not to disturb them. They say that when Prince Mañjusri first built this holy place, he grew his hair for two years and two days, and when the lice formed in the roots, they grew so big that they transformed themselves into monkeys, before leaping out to create a colony of their own.”
“So we do not eat them?” he asked, looking at each of the monkeys in turn and I couldn’t help but laugh. The animals all screeched and gibbered, as if they were suddenly concerned that they might be destined for
the oven.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We do not eat them.”
* * *
• • •
Holy Ujesh, the oldest monk at Swayambhunath, died later that week and I felt great sorrow at the loss of his companionship. Since my arrival at the monastery, we had slept in adjoining cells and he had offered me solace whenever I woke from my regular nightmares. He was the only person in whom I had confided the story of my life and he had reciprocated by telling me of the crime that weighed on his own conscience, but I knew that he had committed his actions out of love, and that a fair and just Buddha, if such an entity existed, would not condemn him for that.
He had been ill for some time and, in his final days, I sat by his bedside chanting parittas while a statue of the prophet stood next to his head and candles burned on all sides. He held my hand as his soul passed from this world to the next and there was agreement that he would surely be reincarnated in splendor as his samsara, the cycle of his life and death, had been a good one.
When the body grew cold, I washed and clothed it in the traditional monk’s attire, ready for the cremation ceremony. Our community gathered as one to chant the Three Jewels—I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha—and when the fire was lit, I wondered whether his soul would travel onward now to reunite with his wife or whether he might be separated from her for several more incarnations yet. Girvesh, I noticed, was struck by the ceremony, both in awe of it and frightened by it at the same time, but when the stench of burning flesh filled the air, his face grew pale and he ran away, back to his room.
A fourteen-year-old boy repulsed by a cremation? Surely he had witnessed many in his life. His reaction struck me as peculiar and I determined to discover more about him.
* * *
• • •
The path to enlightenment, Holy Ujesh had told me, could come only through the teachings of the Buddha but, despite the fact that I studied the sacred manuscripts in the monastic library, I remained skeptical that a spirit could pass into the body of another after death and continue its journey toward illumination. The books intrigued me, however, with their deceptively simply writing and I was touched by the ornate illustrations that covered each page. I was particularly moved by the curled symbol representing the unity of all matter within the world and often found myself becoming mesmerized by it. I had never had a talent for drawing but I appreciated the skill that had gone into each page, the depths of the eyes, the fantastical creatures, the many-winged dragons, and often found my way back to the library when the weather was inclement or my spirits were low simply to lose myself once again in their beauty.
It was on one such afternoon that I discovered Girvesh seated alone in the corner of the room, a manuscript open before him as he read the words slowly, his fingers sliding beneath each of the words.
“Am I disturbing you?” I asked, and he closed his book before turning to me with a welcoming smile. The scars on his face continued to prove an unforgiving blemish on his skin but, as we had grown close in recent weeks, I hoped that he would not mind me asking about them.
“Were you trapped in a fire?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“No,” he replied.
“Scalded by water?”
“No.”
“Will you tell me what happened, then? Did someone do this to you?”
Tears started to form in his eyes and when he lifted his hand to wipe them away, I reached out and touched him on the arm.
“I don’t mind,” he said. “You’ve been very kind to me. I’ve never spoken of them to anyone, and perhaps I should. My scars were punishments, you see. A new one given to me by my father every year on my birthday.”
“Punishments for what?” I asked, frowning. “What did you do?”
“I killed my mother.”
I paused, certain that this was not the case. This boy was not one in whom the spirit of violence lived. “You told Holy Faneel that your mother died in childbirth.”
“She did.”
“But you cannot blame yourself for that.”
“My father did,” he told me. “And every year, on the anniversary of my birth, he sat me down by the fireplace, heated a steel rod and burned it on to my skin to penalize me for the loss that I had caused him. In this way, he said, I would feel a small fraction of the pain that he endured every day.” He stood up and, loosening his tunic, dropped it to his waist. There were more heavy burns on his chest and, when he turned around, even more on his back. Large ones, small ones. There seemed to be no particular order to them, but they had been inflicted on his body over many years, the flawless skin typical of a boy his age barely visible beneath the disarray.
“Monstrous,” I said, recalling how disturbed he had become at the smell of burning flesh. Obviously, the foul perfume had served only to recall these dark moments of his childhood.
“Only this year I decided I would not allow him to do it again. I thought of killing him but knew that I could not commit so heinous an act. And so, I ran away instead.”
“Then he wasn’t killed in the riots, as you first told us?”
“No,” Girvesh said, shaking his head. “I apologize for lying.”
“And you are forgiven. But will he follow you, do you think? I have known fathers who take great exception to their children abandoning them.”
“No,” he replied. “For many years he’s been telling me to leave but I was too young to have the confidence to make my own way in the world. My father, may his name be forever cursed, will be only too happy that I’ve gone.”
“You’re not Buddhist, are you?” I asked. “Or even from Nepal?”
He shook his head. “I am from much further east,” he said. “I had been walking for several months when I arrived here, finding food wherever I could. Begging, when necessary. Stealing, more often. I’d lost track of where I was and when I saw the temple rising above the trees of the valley, it seemed to call out to me.”
“For a man to treat his son with such cruelty goes against nature itself,” I said. “I was not the son my father wanted either, but he rarely beat me, despite being a man prone to violence. But you mustn’t cut yourself off from the world, Girvesh,” I added. “This is a place of great peace, it is true, but you are young, with a life yet to unfold. Do not grow old here simply because you’re afraid of what the outside world might hold for you.”
“But isn’t that what you’re doing?” he asked.
“For now, yes,” I replied. “But not forever. My time here will come to an end one day.”
“And where will you go then?”
I thought about it. Other than Holy Ujesh, I had confided in no one my reasons for seeking sanctuary in the monastery, but something about the boy made me believe that I could tell him the truth.
“I had a cousin,” I told him. “At least, I thought of him as a cousin. We grew up together and I loved him very much. We were each other’s protectors and companions. But he committed an act of betrayal that I cannot forgive, for it resulted in the death of my wife and son. One day, I will find him and I will kill him. I could have done so immediately but decided to wait until I had achieved a degree of peace within myself and he felt confident that he had escaped punishment for his crimes. Until that day arrives I will stay here, but after that he will become my prey, as a lion stalks and hunts a wildebeest. When I find him, his death will not be quick. But it will be a matter of retribution, not of cold-hearted revenge.”
“And when will that day come?” asked the boy, and I could see by the expression on his face that he did not want me to leave the monastery. We had developed affectionate feelings toward each other, as an uncle might feel toward a nephew, and perhaps he did not like the idea of being left there with only a group of aging monks as his companions.
“Soon,” I said, for alth
ough the serenity of Swayambhunath had descended upon me, I’d begun to realize that my quest would begin before much more time had passed. “But not quite yet.”
INDONESIA
A.D. 907
WE WERE STILL a few weeks away from completing work on the statue of Shiva that would grace the entryway to the Prambanan Temple when Monk Falang appeared in the courtyard where the effigy stood and, seeking me out among the craftsmen, summoned me to his office. I had never seen him quite so anxious before and, as we made our way along the corridors and staircases at an exaggerated pace, I wondered what had upset him so much.
“Sit,” he ordered, indicating the chair opposite him and, lifting a sheaf of parchments from the block of stone at which he worked, handed the top one across to me. “A messenger arrived this morning from Jombang,” he said, “carrying this with him. What are we going to do?”
I scanned through the calf vellum on which the message was written in iron gall ink; a simple note informing us that King Balitung would be visiting the temple to mark the unveiling of the statue on which we had been laboring since my arrival almost a year ago.
“But surely this is good news,” I said, looking up from the missive. “The statue is almost completed and His Majesty will surely be pleased to see—”
“Read on,” he told me. “Look when he proposes to visit.”
I turned the pages and understood immediately what was causing his distress. “Seven days from now,” I said. “But it won’t be ready by then.”
“I know,” said Monk Falang. “But what can I do? Write back and tell him not to come? He would have my head for it. Tell me, when do you think work might be finished?”
I ran my hand across my chin and considered it. I had hoped for another three weeks before the unveiling, but it was not unreasonable to think that, with a little extra effort on all our parts, it could be completed in two. But seven days? That seemed close to impossible.
