Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  You don’t need a map. This is the path, you just have to follow it. Keep going.

  I keep going. The sun has disappeared and there is no sign of Tsebar. There is no sign of anything. I am already exhausted, and my water is finished. I practice my Sharchhop in my head. Where are you going? I am going to Tsebar. Are you a nun? No, I am a teacher. Shadowy thoughts of wild animals begin to solidify, taking the shape of bears. There are bears in Bhutan, I read it in a library book. The Himalayan black bear: fierce black bear with characteristic white V on its chest.

  Are you a teacher? No, I am a coward.

  The way up grows even steeper, and my legs ache and burn and shake. I stop, gasping, and rub my stinging eyes. The path bifurcates around an enormous mango tree, one route continuing sharply up, another leveling off into a dense forest. It levels off because it leads to a village, I reason, and take it. Forty-five minutes later, it plunges into a pool of stagnant water and does not come out on the other side. I sit on an exposed tree root and stare into the shadows, trying to determine the most reasonable thing to do. Everything seems reasonable. I should go back to the mango tree. I should go back to Pema Gatshel. I should spend the night here. I should go on and look for the other end of the path. I should scream for help.

  Everything seems possible: I will find the path, I will find a village, I will find Tsebar, someone will find me, no one will find me, I will be lost in the bush and die of starvation. My stomach feels like a huge, hollow, echoing drum, and I have run out of thoughts. I have reached the end of something, but I do not know what it is.

  Twigs snap behind me and there is a cow. A reddish-brown bulk with a bell. Another cow, black with a bent horn. A calf. A boy with a stick. He seems surprised to see me. A man bent under a load of wood and a woman with a basket come up behind him. The cows drink from the green pool, and the man and woman stare at me.

  “Where you is going, miss?” the boy asks me.

  “I’m going to Tsebar.”

  The boy looks troubled. “But, miss,” he says. “Tsebar is not this way. ”

  “Which way is Tsebar?”

  He gestures. Back and up.

  “Thank you,” I say. “I’m a teacher at Pema Gatshel. Across the valley. Do you know Pema Gatshel?”

  “Miss,” he says with great patience. “I am in your class.”

  Karma Dorji is also going to Tsebar with his aunt and uncle. I follow them back to where the path splits, and we sit under the mango tree. It is almost dark now, but I feel strangely light. I came to the end of something and passed through it. I do not know what it was. “Tsebar is not far,” Karma Dorji says. “We is always taking rest here.” He pours clear water from a cloudy jerry can into my empty water bottle. The aunt and uncle unwrap three multicolored round baskets. They pass one to me, and Karma Dorji helps me pull it open. Inside large chunks of meat, red chilies and onions are embedded in a mound of rice.

  Karma Dorji and his uncle are going to share a basket. They are waiting for me. His aunt is saying something.

  “She is telling our food is not that very good, please don’t mind,” Karma Dorji translates. “She is telling please eat.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and eat the meat. It is delicious.

  Entrance

  Quand un étranger

  arrive... il éprouve,

  sans pouvoir s‘en

  rendre compte, un

  sentiment de gaiété

  et de bien-être qui

  persiste jusqu’au

  départ.

  —Ibn Khurdadba

  Anyone Can Live Anywhere

  Avast and silent darkness settles over Tsebar as we approach, and my flashlight cuts a bright wide beam through the blackness. Karma Dorji points to the dark shape of Jane’s house a few yards away. The wooden slats that cover the windows are rimmed in warm yellow light. Jane opens the door before I knock. “You made it,” she smiles. I turn to thank Karma Dorji’s aunt and uncle again, but they wave off my thanks and disappear.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” Jane says. She is wearing a dark blue kira that falls smoothly to the floor, and her straight blond hair is tied neatly back. Everything about her is elegant and serene. How is it possible, I wonder, to wash clothes in a creek and still look like that?

  “I got lost,” I gasp, wriggling out of my backpack. I am afraid to sit down. My knees will not bend, and if they bend, surely they will never again unbend. I stand inside the door, looking around. At one end of the room is a kitchen; the low stove is made out of mud, with two holes in the top for pots and another in the base for the wood. Pots and plates are stacked tidily on shelves above a screened cabinet. At the other end is a sitting area with benches and a low, wooden table. The floor is covered with a straw mat, and the rough mud and stone walls look freshly whitewashed. There are candles everywhere, jam jars of flowers, blue-covered cushions on the wooden benches. In one shadowy corner, there is a skinny chicken. I blink several times but it does not vanish. Is it a pet? Is it dinner?

  Through the door to the other room, I can see a thick quilt spread over a wooden bed, a stack of books and a kerosene lamp on a bedside table, a shuttered window.

  “What a lovely house,” I say. Jane laughs but I mean it. It feels like a real home, except perhaps for that chicken. I tell myself that I will also transform that horrid place in Pema Gatshel. I will have blue-covered cushions and jam jars of flowers when I go back. And then I remember: I am not going back to Pema Gatshel. I am going home.

  “How is your foot?” I ask. I notice she is limping slightly.

  “Okay but not great,” Jane says. “I’m supposed to go across to Pema Gatshel next week for our health course—it should be better by then.”

  “Our health course?”

  “It’s run by the Norwegian doctors at the Pema Gatshel hospital for all the teachers assigned to morning clinic. Do you mean you haven’t been assigned to morning clinic yet?”

  I shake my head.

  “You will be,” she promises, taking down tin plates and spoons from the shelves. I start to say that I have already eaten but realize I am hungry again. “My landlord and his wife are coming for dinner. In fact, they are bringing dinner. Pema is an excellent cook,” Jane says. “Now, tell me, how is everything over there at Pema Gatshel? How do you like it?”

  I hate it, I want to say. Pema Gatshel is awful, my students don’t understand a word I say, I got bitten by a dog, my apartment is hideous and, anyway, I’m going home right after this visit. But the door opens and a man and woman come in. Jane introduces them: Jangchuk, her landlord, a thin wiry man in a dark-red gho, and his wife, Pema, plump and apple-cheeked. We smile crazily at each other, and then Pema begins to unpack several bottles and pots from her bag.

  “Bangchang and arra before dinner,” Jane says. “Can you drink?”

  “I haven’t had arra yet. What’s bangchang?”

  “It’s a kind of barley beer. It’s delicious.”

  We sit in a semicircle around the mudstove. Jangchuk has taken a small wooden bowl out of his gho and is wiping it with a piece of cloth. Jane and Pema have their own wooden bowls; I am given an enormous tin mug. Pema stirs and strains and ladles and finally fills our cups. I sip at mine gingerly and am pleasantly surprised. The bangchang is warm and mild, sweet and salty. “It’s good,” I say. “How do you say delicious in Sharchhop?”

  “Zhim-poo la, ” Jane says.

  “Zhim-poo la,” I repeat, and Jangchuk and Pema laugh. Pema ladles more bangchang into my cup.

  “Zhé, zhé,” she says.

  “She’s telling you to drink up,” Jane says. I take a slightly bigger sip. It must be safe, I think, if Jane is drinking it, and it really is good. Pema adds more bangchang to our cups and exhorts me to drink. I begin to feel warm and sleepy. When the ladle swings my way again, I keep my hand firmly over my cup and do a ridiculous mime of a drunken, dizzy me. Pema nods and puts her ladle back in the pot, but as soon as I move my hand away, her arm shoots
over and my cup is full. “An old Sharchhop trick,” Jane laughs. I am relieved when the pot is empty, but Jane says, “Now comes the arra.”

  Pema fills my cup with what looks like water. I take a tiny sip of the sharp, bitter liquid and shudder.

  “Zhimpoo la?” she asks.

  I nod helplessly.

  “It’s more of an acquired taste,” Jane says, draining her bowl. “It reminds me of saké.”

  It reminds me of lighter fluid, but by the fourth or fifth tiny sip, it’s not quite so bad, and by the second cup, I am sure that it is improving my comprehension of Sharchhop. Dinner is mountains of rice and large chunks of potato cooked with chilies, followed by a final cup of arra, called zim-chang, the good-night drink. “If you were staying with Pema, you’d get zheng-chang, ” Jane tells me. “Wake-up arra, served at dawn.” Pema tries to make me eat and drink more but I collapse on the floor in protest. “This is Bhutanese hospitality,” Jane says. “They fill you up until you can’t move and then say sorry, we have nothing to give you.”

  I volunteer to wash the dishes, but Jane doesn’t have running water inside the house. We will wash them tomorrow outside. Out in the latrine, squatting in the malodorous darkness, I realize what a luxury my indoor plumbing is, even if the running water doesn’t run very often. Back inside, Pema and Jangchuk and I say many goodbyes and then they are gone. Jane puts cushions on the floor under the window and I unroll my sleeping bag over them and climb in, fully dressed. My feet and shoulders ache, my face is rough and gritty, and my brain feels like it is sloshing around inside my skull. Jane sets a candle on the low table. “Now, there are just two things I have to tell you about before you go to sleep.”

  I am already asleep. I do not want to hear two things.

  “If you hear things falling off the shelves in the night, it’s just the rats. And in the morning, could you just reach behind you and slide open that window to let the chicken out?”

  “The chicken?” I had forgotten about the chicken. I struggle to sit up. There it is, sleeping in a nook near the stove. “Do you get fresh eggs every morning?” I ask Jane.

  “Well, that’s why I got it, but it doesn’t lay eggs for some reason,” Jane says. “Good night.”

  I blow out the candle and push myself down deep into the sleeping bag. Do not think about the rats, I tell myself. Do not, do not. I lie there, hoping that sleep comes before the rats, but it does not. And it’s not just rats, it’s the Rat Olympics. I can hear them sprinting across the floor, vaulting from shelf to shelf, somersaulting over pots and plates. On the sidelines, spectator rats cheer them on. Something falls with a crash and the crowds go wild. I sit up, gasping.

  “They knock that same tin off every night,” Jane calls from the next room.

  I find my flashlight and aim a spot of light at the kitchen. There is a moment of silence and then they begin again. I burrow deeper into my bed and concentrate on the gentle ringing of a horse’s bell outside. Eventually, I fall asleep and dream I am walking. All night I walk up and down hillsides, over streams, through forests. I have a dim idea that I am trying to walk out of Bhutan, but Bhutan never ends. I awake, exhausted, to cool grey light and the sound of clucking. The chicken is heading my way. I fumble with the wooden slat above my head, but the chicken is not interested in the window. It is interested in my flashlight, which it hops and clucks around until the flashlight falls to the floor with a suspicious little ping! I retrieve it and turn it on. I take the batteries out and put them back in. Nothing. The chicken throws itself out the window with a shriek of satisfaction. I lie back down, composing a letter in my head to the manufacturers. Dear Sirs: Your $50 high-tech flashlight guaranteed to last five years has been broken by a barren chicken.

  We sit outside on the step, eating oatmeal with powdered milk for breakfast. Sunlight pours down thickly and the whole green world shimmers. Jane is talking about how hard it was when she first arrived. She hadn’t quite realized ... how hard it would be. But then, she got to know people, Jangchuk and Pema befriended her, she learned a little Sharchhop. And she started teaching and that made up for everything else. The kids make it all worthwhile, she says. They are bright and unaffected and responsive. She loves them.

  I say maybe I’ve made a mistake, maybe Bhutan is not for me.

  Jane nods. “I felt that way at first. But you know what they say about these overseas postings: anyone can live anywhere. You think you can’t in the beginning, but then you do.”

  After breakfast, we go to collect water, each of us carrying a plastic bucket. A group of children follows us, shouting “Good morning, miss!”

  “Good morning Kezang, good morning Nidup, good morning Karma,” Jane calls back. The village tap is a black standpipe in the center of the village. Several people are there with an assortment of buckets, bamboo containers, jerry cans and tin pots. Jane knows everyone. “Pema Gatshel lopen, ” she tells them, pointing to me. Lopen means teacher. We fill the buckets and haul them back. I slop most of my water onto my ankles and shoes. Jane washes the plates and pots on her front step, scrubbing them with a gritty powder first and stacking them up in grey soapy piles, rinsing each item carefully so that no water is wasted. The kettle on the kerosene stove is steaming, and I pour the water into a Chinese thermos. There is no shop in Tsebar: kerosene and all other manufactured goods have to be carried across the valley from Pema Gatshel. Jane cooks on the mudstove in the evening, and only uses the kerosene stove in the morning, to cook breakfast and boil water. Her stove uses wicks and is easier to light than my “pump and explode” type. “Oh those things,” Jane says. “They terrify me. I don’t know how you manage.” I like the sound of that word, manage. How is she doing? Oh, well, it’s difficult but she’s managing. I do not tell Jane that I manage by not cooking.

  Now she collects the buckets again: she is going to the creek to wash clothes, and I go with her. We walk through the village, several stone and mud houses scattered around a temple. Groves of ancient mango and oak trees crowd close around the village. With its tarmacked road and gypsum trucks and shops, Pema Gatshel suddenly looks like a big town in comparison. I ask where the path goes to after Tsebar and Jane says that India is only a few ridges away. I stand and turn, taking in the view: 360 degrees of mountains folded into one another, ridges running down into unseen valleys and rising again, this geography repeating itself over and over. It is hard to imagine the plains of India from here. It is hard to imagine anything at all beyond these mountains, and I have the strangest feeling that I have been here forever, that I have dreamed up that other life in Canada.

  We turn off the main path and hobble down a slope to the creek, where Jane immerses her clothes in the shallow water, and I sit on a rock in the shade. She tells me about Jangchuk and Pema, how they took care of her in the beginning, bringing her dinner every night until she could manage for herself. Jangchuk is a gomchen, Jane says, a lay priest and the caretaker of the temple. Gomchens usually belong to the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism (slightly different from the Drukpa Kargyue sect, which is the official religion of Bhutan); they are allowed to marry; they do not wear the robes of a fully ordained monk, but their ghos are longer, worn calf-length instead of knee-length, and they often keep their hair long. People go to them for all sorts of religious ceremonies, for blessings, horoscopes, births, deaths, illness.

  “Don’t people go to the hospital in Pema Gatshel?” I ask.

  “Mmm, they’d almost always go to a lama first, because illness is usually seen as having a spiritual cause. If the lama is unable to do anything they might go to the hospital, but by then it’s often too late, and if the person dies in the hospital, people blame the foreign medicine.”

  “Is traditional Bhutanese medicine herbal?”

  “Some of it is,” Jane says. “But most of the treatment here consists of particular prayers and pujas. They also do a couple of other things, like blood-letting. Tiny incisions are made at a certain place on the body. The worst thing I’ve ever se
en was the searing. I didn’t actually see it, only the scars on Pema. They burn the skin with a heated metal rod.” She draws thick rectangles on her arm with her thumb and forefinger to show me.

  She tells me about another treatment which Pema underwent for her chronic stomach pain. After some prayers, she said, Jangchuk had taken a cow’s horn with a hole in the tip and applied the base to Pema’s stomach. He sucked on the tip and then lifted the horn—there on Pema’s stomach was a black clot, which Jangchuk hastily threw out. Jane said he hadn’t made an incision; she had been watching carefully, and there was no sign of bleeding. “What was it, do you think?” I ask. Jane shrugs. “I don’t know. Jangchuk said it was the thing that was making her sick, and sure enough, she got better shortly afterward.”

  I do not answer. I am thinking about magician’s techniques, sleight-of-hand, a false-bottomed horn. “Do you think it could have been a trick?” I ask Jane.

  She says she considered this, but why would he trick his own wife?

  “Maybe it was psychological,” I said. “A placebo.”

  But Jane shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Jangchuk believes in his medicine. You know, in the beginning, people would tell me so-and-so was sick because he’d seen a ghost or a black snake, or he hadn’t made an offering to his guardian deity, and I’d just shake my head. But now, I’m not so sure.”

  “But do you believe that people really get sick because they’ve seen a ghost?” I ask.

  “I can’t say anymore. So many things happen here that you just can’t explain, and I don’t know enough of the language to understand the whole picture. I ask the older students but I think a lot gets lost in the translation. They say ‘ghost’ or ‘black magic’ but who knows exactly what that means? We’re seeing just the tip of a whole belief system. Faith makes things real.”

  “But only psychologically,” I say. “Not physically real, right?”