Love In No Man's Land

by Duo Ji Zhuo Ga

  ‘Ciwang…!’ Gongzha was startled but immediately began setting up his gun-stand on the ground.

  He took aim at Kaguo and was about to pull the trigger when a great shout came from behind him. ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t hurt her!’

  Gongzha glanced back to see Master Zhamu and Teacher Samu rushing down from the red cliff, three disciples following behind. When they reached Gongzha, they lay down beside him.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ Zhamu said. Pulling out a white conch shell, he blew a low-pitched, horn-like call.

  When the bear heard the sound, she looked surprised, stopped chasing Ciwang and sat dazed on the ground.

  Gongzha lifted his gun again, but Samu restrained him with a hand on the shoulder. ‘She isn’t the Kaguo you’re looking for,’ he said gently. ‘This cub was born last year. Look carefully at the circle on her forehead. It’s wider than Kaguo’s, isn’t it?’

  Gongzha looked intently. Even though the bear was about Kaguo’s size and had a white circle on her forehead, Samu was right: the circle was much bigger than Kaguo’s.

  Zhamu advanced slowly, still blowing on the conch shell, his robes billowing red against the green grass, blue sky and white clouds. The bear continued to sit quietly. Ciwang stayed crouched to one side, in shock.

  When Zhamu reached the bear’s side, he placed his palm on her head, looked into her eyes and spoke to her quietly. The bear’s eyes clouded over. She slumped to the side, put her head on her front paws, closed her eyes and began to snore.

  ‘Master Zhamu is a true son of Master Cinuo,’ Samu said, ‘the only one trained in the art of bear-taming.’

  Two ascetics carrying lengths of rattan appeared, hurried over to Zhamu, pointed to Ciwang and spoke quietly. Zhamu nodded and turned to Ciwang with a deeply pained expression on his face.

  ‘When you got lost and ended up near here, it was Samu who found you on his way home from picking herbs. It was Samu who rescued you, who took you on as a disciple and taught you traditional medicine. Why did you hurt him?’

  Squirming under Zhamu’s severe gaze, Ciwang yelled, ‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me who wanted to hurt him. It was him – he made me do it!’ He pointed in the direction of an elderly monk in tightly wrapped robes. ‘He made me follow you all – it was him, it wasn’t me!’

  ‘You’re lying,’ the elderly monk shot back. ‘If you tried to hurt the teacher and the Buddha punished you, what’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘It was you! You made me put the scorpion poison in the medicine bottle. You said that if the woman died, Gongzha would leave and the story about me hurting Dawa would never come out.’

  ‘You’re lying.’ The old monk’s eyes glinted coldly at Ciwang. He pulled out a knife and was about to rush him, but two young monks held him back and pinioned his arms.

  ‘I’m lying? As soon as you got here, you found me and told me you were sure that these people were the descendants of the Nacangdeba and the guardians of King Gesar’s treasure. You told me that when we found the treasure, we could go back to the grassland and buy all the pasture and livestock we liked. You made nice with Master Zhamu, because you thought he knew where the treasure was. But you were wrong, because the Medicine Buddha was lost, so the secret of King Gesar’s treasure was lost too. Then Gongzha turned up and you thought he might have the Medicine Buddha. So you told me to poison his woman, because you knew he’d bring out the Medicine Buddha if he had it, to save his woman.’ Ciwang was shrieking now, his eyes bulging, his spit flying in all directions.

  He rushed up to the gruff old monk. ‘And everything happened as you predicted: I put the scorpion poison in her medicine and Gongzha brought out the Medicine Buddha. You were afraid that Samu was on to us, so you followed him when he went to pick herbs and pushed that boulder over the cliff, hoping to crush and kill him. But it only grazed him and made him more suspicious, so you tried again, saying that Samu would be picking herbs here today and that I should drive the bear here so he would be mauled to death. What you didn’t know was that they have a special relationship with those bears. As Buddha is my witness, this man made me do everything, it has nothing to do with me!’

  ‘You’re lying! You did all those evil things yourself. Don’t put the poisoning on my head.’

  Samu looked at Ciwang and addressed him with pity in his voice. ‘Should you not reflect on your own part in this? I began to suspect you when the scorpion poison suddenly appeared in that medicine bottle. My treatment room is usually locked tight and I always check it thoroughly for scorpions before I use it. How could one have got in? And there was only venom in the bottle, no actual scorpion, so the venom had been put in there deliberately. The only person other than my two disciples to come near the treatment room that day was you. I raised those two disciples myself; they’re orphans and I trust them completely. But your ego is too big. From the start, you wanted to learn medicine from me as quickly as possible so you could return home and make money from it. That I could understand: you’d been part of that world for many years and it would take time to change your way of thinking. I hoped that under my guidance you would begin to see things differently, but instead you strayed further and further away, particularly after this man arrived. The two of you spent all day gadding around together, not reciting scriptures or studying, just looking everywhere for clues to the whereabouts of King Gesar’s treasure. Oh, you lost creatures, if only you’d taken the time to think about what you were doing. Buddha has shown you the path, why do you turn away from it?’

  ‘The reason I wanted to study and return to the grassland as soon as possible was not for money but because I wanted to heal Dawa. I never intended to make her crazy. She was nasty to me and she threatened me; she said that Gongzha would deal with me when he came back on annual leave, so I was terrified and I knocked her unconscious with a rock. How was I to know she’d wake up crazy? I’ve had nightmares every day since – I see demons everywhere, coming to chase me down.’

  Ciwang knelt on the ground and tugged at Samu’s robe, babbling and weeping. ‘Master, I truly didn’t do any of this on purpose – it was him. After he came here, he kept telling me that if we could only find the Medicine Buddha, we could locate King Gesar’s treasure and then we’d be able to have any woman we wanted. I did these horrible things only after hearing his evil talk. Forgive me, Master.’

  ‘The person of whom you must ask forgiveness is not me, it’s him,’ Samu said, pointing at Gongzha.

  Ciwang crawled over to Gongzha and prostrated himself repeatedly in front of him, palms clasped, tears running down his face. ‘I was wrong, Gongzha. I’m sorry about your mother – a demon poisoned my heart. Buddha has already punished me: he made me go without sleep every day; as soon as night fell, he sent demons to catch me and bite me. I couldn’t stand it, so I left the grassland. But I still haven’t found peace; your mother still comes into my dreams, haunting me with that cold laugh of hers.’

  He smashed his head against the rocky ground, and there were traces of blood in the dust on his forehead. ‘I was wrong. I apologise to your family: I apologise to your mother, I apologise to your father. I won’t go back to the grassland and I’ll carry on with my medical practice. I’ll be a good person from now on.’ He looked up very contritely at Gongzha. ‘You were a PLA soldier and a government cadre, Gongzha. You’re a good man, forgive me…’

  Gongzha stood there remembering how his father had been tied to the tent pole and how his mother had suffered unbearable pain for so many years. He lifted his foot and kicked Ciwang as far as he could, then turned to find his gun.

  Feng held him back. ‘He’s been punished enough, don’t you think, Gongzha? His leg’s been mauled by the bear, and it’s obvious he’s suffered a lot these past years. That was a unique time – neither people nor animals acted rationally – and you can see he’s been in torment ever since. Look at him, he’s like a mad old man. Forgive him, Gongzha.’

  Gongzha held Feng’s gaze for a long time, then turned to loo
k at Ciwang. The old man dragging his bloodied, broken leg and with sparse white hair sticking to his wizened face was nothing like the arrogant man of times past. At his age, Ciwang should have been dandling a grandson on his knee in a warm tent, but because of the mistakes he made during that time long ago, he’d ended up in No Man’s Land, alone and in a pitiful state.

  Gongzha hesitated a moment, then slowly set down his gun. ‘Get up,’ he said.

  Feng patted Gongzha comfortingly on the shoulder. Love and hate were choices: from the moment she’d chosen him, she’d not looked back.

  Ciwang prostrated himself at Gongzha’s feet in relief. Then two young disciples supported him as he limped over to Samu.

  ‘They will help you home,’ Samu said, waving his hand. ‘We won’t be able to save your leg, but if in exchange for your leg you are granted a life with a peaceful heart, Buddha will have been merciful.’

  Ciwang wiped away his tears and hobbled off.

  ‘Basang, take off your outer robe,’ Master Zhamu said, passing the white conch shell to one of his disciples and turning to the elderly monk whose arms had been pinioned. ‘The Medicine Buddha has returned, so you don’t need to wrap yourself up any more. It just makes people even more suspicious of you.’

  ‘Basang…? Basang from where?’ Gongzha asked curiously.

  ‘From your grassland. He said he came here on the instructions of Living Buddha Zhaduo, to take the Medicine Buddha back,’ Zhamu said lightly.

  ‘Cuoe Temple’s Basang? Living Buddha Zhaduo’s disciple?’ Gongzha said in shock.

  Zhamu nodded and motioned for the disciples to strip off Basang’s head covering. They revealed a pasty face that looked very much like the old Basang of Cuoe Temple.

  ‘In truth, I doubted you from the moment you arrived,’ Zhamu said. ‘Zhaduo came here himself a long time ago, when he got lost in a snowstorm and Samu saved him. He stayed for three months, studying Tantric initiation practices with me and traditional medicine with Samu. He was a good man, his heart was noble, and while he lived here he followed all of our rules. He knew the Medicine Buddha wasn’t here, so why would he have sent you to get it?’

  ‘Why didn’t you expose me sooner?’ Basang asked, a treacherous gleam in his eye.

  ‘You’d not been in the Buddhist fold for long and I kept hoping you would see the light. The difference between a good thought and an evil thought is simply a matter of a change in direction.’

  ‘“The difference between a good thought and an evil thought is simply a matter of a change in direction”?’ Basang howled with laughter. ‘You want me to be like you and spend my whole life reading scriptures, never looking at a woman? Do you even know what a car looks like or that you can fill your eyes with beautiful women if you have a TV? No, that’s not the life for me. I don’t want to live in the past – I want to enjoy the pleasures of now. Give me baijiu to drink and women to sleep with and I’ll be just fine.’

  Gongzha stepped in front of him and said accusingly, ‘So you pretended to be Living Buddha Zhaduo’s disciple because you wanted to find the statue he was protecting? I assume you were also involved in the theft of Cuoe Temple’s ancient Buddhas – you and Luobudunzhu?’

  ‘You want to know something? That Medicine Buddha statue was originally my family’s.’

  ‘Your family’s…?’

  ‘My great-grandfather took it from this place, but the old fart got confused and gave it to Cuoe Temple’s living Buddha.’

  ‘Your great-grandfather was that thieving herder Master Cinuo saved?’

  ‘It takes skill to acquire the best things, but what would you know about that?’ Basang threw Gongzha a scornful look. ‘Do you really think I’d have made all that effort to pass myself off as a disciple of that crazy man just so I could get hold of an old statue? How much can it be worth?’

  ‘Ah, I’ve got it now – you’re after Princess Gesar’s treasure!’ Gongzha howled with laughter and his hearty guffaws echoed across the mountain wilderness. ‘Everyone on the grassland knows the legend of King Gesar, but has anyone actually seen the princess’s treasure? You really think those legends are true? What sort of grasslander are you – never getting your hands dirty, never doing an honest day’s work, but focusing on bad things instead? You’ve had your eyes pecked out by vultures – you wouldn’t recognise the treasure if it was right in front of you.’

  ‘What do you know? If there was no treasure, why would these people live in a nest of scorpions?’

  Master Zhamu, who’d been staring up at the mountains, turned and looked at Basang with pity. ‘Do you want to see Princess Gesar’s treasure?’

  Basang opened his eyes wide. ‘I’ve put so much effort into this – of course I do.’

  ‘And the rest of you? Would you also like to see Princess Gesar’s treasure?’ Zhamu asked the ascetics behind him.

  Most of the elders straightened their robes, lowered their heads, pressed their palms together and said, ‘Master, it means nothing to us.’

  Only a handful of younger ascetics looked at Zhamu with curiosity.

  ‘Very well. Everyone come with me.’ Zhamu walked towards his horse and two disciples rushed ahead and helped him up. He sped off through the valley, closely followed by everyone else. Basang was in the middle of the pack.

  *

  The sun hung over the mountain, its orange rays casting a rainbow of colours across the land, but the summit of Tajiapu remained wreathed in cloud; even five- and six-thousand-metre snow mountains seemed no bigger than hillocks alongside it.

  A vast, barren plain of shattered black rocks stretched as far as the eye could see. The rock fragments were small, thin and sharp as knives: flowers couldn’t poke their way through them, and any animal that travelled across the plain risked injuring its feet. Patches of the razor-sharp rocks gleamed in the sunlight, like the varnished black or bluish-black background to an oil painting.

  The cloudless sky was a pure, clear blue and the rolling mountains, some capped with snow and some not, unfurled like a bridge beneath it. A troop of people dressed in crimson steered their horses into the setting sun, their shadows stretching long and low across the ground, creating strange patterns. Some of them walked with their heads up, scanning this new world to left and right, a spring in their step that caused the hems of their robes to flutter. Others kept their gaze lowered. Everyone wore a different expression, but they all kept spinning their prayer wheels, no matter how long or short their stride. The prayer wheels turned in a single direction, spinning to an easy, unhurried rhythm as natural as the heartbeats beneath those crimson robes.

  Master Zhamu made his way to the front of the troop and a disciple held his horse steady. His face was deeply wrinkled, and perhaps because the sun was so strong, his eyes were narrowed. He had kept the secret of the treasure from the day he’d donned his crimson robes, and to protect it he’d sworn never to leave the valley. But to be standing there in peace, far removed from worldly matters and with his heart attuned to the Buddha, that was perhaps the greatest blessing of his life. Protecting the secret was not actually important.

  When they reached the foot of the snow mountain, everyone raised their heads in unison to gaze up at the clouds gathered around Tajiapu’s peak, stained gold by the evening sun. The white peak softened the fierceness of the sun and made it even more beautiful.

  Zhamu sat cross-legged on the ground. Samu followed suit, then the others did likewise. Before them was the great snow mountain, which had waited for so many years. People had longed for this moment, dreamt of this moment: a swathe of crimson gathered at the foot of the mountain. As they looked up, the unexpected beauty of what they saw smote every one of their hearts. Even Basang, who had come for the treasure, lost the vicious look in his eye in the presence of such magnificence.

  They began to chant the mantra of the Medicine Buddha, keeping to a gentle rhythm, neither too fast nor too slow, their intonations rising and falling in harmony as if they’d practised it thousand
s of time.

  The seemingly endless chanting made Basang restless. He stamped his feet and occasionally kicked stones across the plain. He couldn’t understand how, with the treasure right there in front of them, they could sit so calmly reciting scriptures. Eventually he could stand it no longer and he began to climb the mountain, impatient to get to the treasure.

  Gongzha and Feng sat behind the others hand in hand, the brown horse standing beside them with its head down. For fifteen minutes, or perhaps a little longer, the monks’ red robes swayed gently to left and right. Then they stood up and straightened their clothes, and a line of crimson dots began to move up towards the peak. Were they fulfilling something decided long ago, or were they brushing the dust from their hearts?

  The setting sun slowly paled and the moon climbed towards the mountaintop. It was a sacred, timeless sight: the sun and moon in the sky together.

  Suddenly they heard a crash and Gongzha and Feng turned to look. It was as if a patch of red flowers had come into full bloom on the rocky ground some twenty metres behind them. Basang, the man who dreamt of riches, lay in a rapidly expanding pool of blood, his hands and feet twitching.

  Red figures came hurrying down the mountainside. Two young men crouched beside Basang, glanced at him and said, ‘Master, he’s already dead.’

  Master Zhamu shook his head and sighed. ‘Basang expected Princess Gesar’s treasure room to be full of glittering jewels. But what he found was a series of frescoes depicting the twelve great vows of the Medicine Buddha. That is our treasure: the Medicine Buddha’s wish that we be in possession of healthy minds, healthy bodies and healthy spirits. Basang could not accept that, so he jumped off the cliff.’

  ‘If your heart and your mind are not healthy,’ Samu said, ‘then what good is it even if all the wealth in the world is piled in front of you? He never understood that.’