He took off walking again, south towards the Gate, on the busy promenade high over the ocean, the trams squealing by. When he reached the park overlooking the strait he returned to the spot where he had been just hours before with his granddaughter, and looked around again. Everything remained the same this time, retaining its shape and its meaning; no flow into colours, no yellow ocean. That had been an odd experience, and he shuddered again remembering it.
He sat on the low wall overlooking the water, and took his book from his jacket pocket, a book of poems translated from the ancient Sanskrit. He opened it at random, and read, 'This verse from Kalidasa's "Sakuntala" is considered by many scholars of Sanskrit to be the most beautiful in the language.'
ramyani viksya madhurans ca nisamya sabdan paryutsuki bhavati yat sukhito pi jantuh tac cetasa smarati nunarn abodhapurvarn bhavasthirani jananantarasauhrdani
Even the man who is happy glimpses something Or a thread of sound touches him
And his heart overflows with a longing he does not recognize
Then it must be that he is remembering a place out of reach people he loved
In a life before this their pattern
Still there in him waiting
He looked up, looked around. An awesome place, this great gate to the sea. He thought, maybe 1 should stay here. Maybe this day is telling me something. Maybe this is my home, hungry ghost or not. Maybe we cannot avoid becoming hungry ghosts, no matter where we live; so might as well be home.
He walked back to his daughter's. A letter had arrived on his lectern
from an acquaintance of his, living at the farm station of Fangzhang's college, inland from the city a hundred Ii, in the big central valley. This acquaintance from his Beijing years had heard he was visiting the area, and wondered if he would like to come out and teach a class or two a history of the Chinese revolution, perhaps ‑foreign relations, League work, whatever he liked. Because of his association with Kung, among other things, he would be viewed by the students as a living piece of world history. 'A living fossil, you mean,' he snorted. Like that fish whose species was four hundred million years old, dragged up recently in a net off Madagascar. Old Dragonfish. He wrote back to his acquaintance and accepted the invitation, then wrote to Pyinkayaing and put in for a more extended leave of absence.
4. The Red Egg
The farm extension of the college, now a little college itself, was clustered at the west end of a town called Putatoi, west of the North Lung River, on the banks of Puta Creek, a lively brook pouring out of the coastal range and creating a riverine gallery of oaks and brush on an alluvial berm just a few hands higher than the rest of the valley. The valley otherwise was given over entirely to rice cultivation; the big rivers flowing into it out of the mountains on both sides had been diverted into an elaborate irrigation system, and the already flat valley floor had been shaved even flatter, into a stepwise system of broad flooded terraces, each terrace just a few fingers higher than the one below it. All the dikes in this system curved, as part of some kind of erosion resistance strategy, and so the landscape looked somewhat like Annam or Kampuchea, or anywhere in tropical Asia really, except that wherever the land was not flooded, it was shockingly dry. Straw‑coloured hills rose to the west, in the first of the coastal ranges between the valley and the bay; then to the east the grand snow~topped peaks of the Gold Mountains stood like a distant Himalaya.
Putatoi was tucked into a nest of trees in this broad expanse of green and gold. It was a village in the Japanese style, with shops and apart~ ments clustered by the stream, and small groupings of cottages ringing the town centre north of the stream. After Pyinkayaing it seemed tiny, dowdy, sleepy, green, dull. Bao liked it.
The students at the college mainly came from farms in the valley, and they were mostly studying to be rice farmers or orchard managers.
Their questions in the Chinese history class that Bao taught were amazingly ignorant, but they were fresh‑faced and cheerful youths; they didn't care in the slightest who Bao was, or what he had done in the postwar period so long ago. He liked that too.
His little seminar of older students, who were studying history specif‑ ically, were more intrigued by his presence among them. They asked him about Zhu Isao, of course, and even about Kung Jianguo, and about the Chinese revolution. Bao answered as if it were a period of history that he had studied extensively, and perhaps written a book or two about. He did not offer them personal reminiscences, and most of the time felt that he had none to offer. They watched him very closely as he spoke.
'What you have to understand,' he told them, 'is that no one won the Long War. Everyone lost, and we have not recovered from it even yet.
'Remember what you have been taught about it. It lasted sixty‑seven years, twothirds of a century, and it's estimated now that almost a billion people died in it. Think of it this way; I've been talking to a biologist here who works on population issues, and he has tried to estimate how many humans have lived in all of history, from the start of the species until now.'
Some in the class laughed at such an idea.
'You haven't beard of this? He estimates that there have been about forty billion humans to have lived since the species came into being although of course that was no determinate moment, so this is just a game we play. But it means that if there have been forty billion humans in all history, then one in forty of all the people ever to have lived, were killed in the Long War. That's a big percentage!
'So. The whole world fell into disarray, and now we've lived in the war's shadow for so long we don't know what full sunlight would look like. Science keeps making advances, but many of them rebound on us. The natural world is being poisoned by our great numbers and our crude industries. And if we quarrel again, all could be lost. You are probably aware, certainly most governments are, that science could provide us very quickly with extremely powerful bombs, they say one bomb per city, and so that threat hangs over us too. If any country tries for such a bomb, all may follow.
'So, all these dangers inspired the creation of the League of All Peoples, in the hope of making a global system that could cope with our global problems. That came on the heels of the Year One effort, standardized measurements, and all the rest, to form what has been called the scientizing of the world, or the modernization, or the Hodenosaunee programme, among other names for it. Our time, in effect.'
'In Islam they don't like all that,' one student pointed out.
'Yes, this has been a problem for them, how to reconcile their beliefs with the scientizing movement. But we have seen changes in Nsara spread through most of Firanja, and what a united Firanja implies is that they have agreed there is more than one way to be a good Muslim. If your Islam is a form of sufism that is Buddhist in all but name, and you say it is all right, then it is hard to condemn the Buddhists in the next valley. And this is happening in many places. All the strands are beginning to weave together, you see. We have had to do it to survive.'
At the end of that first set of classes, the history teachers invited Bao to stay on and do it on a regular basis; and after some thought, he accepted their invitation. He liked these people, and the work that came from them. The bulk of the college's efforts had to do with growing more food, with fitting people into the natural systems of the earth less clum‑ sily. History was part of this, and the history teachers were friendly. Also a single woman his age, a lecturer in linguistics, had been particularly friendly through the time of his stay. They had eaten quite a few meals together, and got into the habit of meeting for lunch. Her name was Gao Qirignian.
Bao moved into the small group of cottages where Gao lived, renting one next to hers that had come open at just the right time. The cottages were Japanese in style, with thin walls and big windows, all clustered around a common garden. It was a nice little neighbourhood.
In the mornings Bao started to hoe and plant vegetables in one corner of that central garden. Through a gap between the cottages he could see the great val
ley oaks in their streamside gallery; beyond them the green rice paddies, and the isolated peak of Mount Miwok, over a hundred Ii away, south of the great delta. To the cast and north, more rice paddies, curving green on green. The coastal range lay to the west,
the Cold Mountains to the east. He rode an old bicycle to the college for classes, and taught his smaller seminars at a set of picnic tables by the side of the stream, under a stand of enormous valley oaks. Every once in a while he would rent a little airboat from the airport just west of town, and pilot it down the delta to Fangzhang, to visit Anzi and her family. Though Bao and Anzi remained stiff and fractious with each other, the repetition of these visits eventually made them seem normal, a pleasant ritual in most respects. They did not seem connected to his memories of the past, but an event of their own. Well, Bao would say to Gao, I'm going to go down to Fangzhang and bicker with my daughter.
Have fun, Gao would say.
Mainly he stayed in Putatoi, and taught classes. He liked the young people and their fresh faces. He liked the people who lived in the cluster of cottages around the garden. They worked in agriculture, mostly, either in the college's agronomy labs and experimental fields, or out in the paddies and orchards themselves. That was what people did in this valley. The neighbours all gave him advice on how best to cultivate his little garden, and very often it was conflicting advice, which was no very reassuring thing given that they were among the world's experts on the topic, and that there might be more people than there was food in the world to feed them. But that too was a lesson, and though it worried him, it also made him laugh. And he liked the labour, the sitting in the earth, weeding and looking at vegetables grow. Staring across rice terraces at Mount Miwok. He babysat for some of the younger couples in the cottages, and talked with them about the events of the town, and spent the evenings out lawn bowling with a group who liked to do that.
Before long the routines of this life became as if they were the only ones he had ever known. One morning, babysitting for a little girl who had caught the chicken pox, sitting by her as she lay thoughtlessly in a lukewarm oatmeal bath, stoically flicking the water with her finger and occasionally moaning like a small animal, he felt a sudden gust of happiness sweep through him, simply because he was the old widower of the neighbourhood, and people used him as a babysitter. Old Dragonfish. There had been just such a man back in Beijing, living in a hole in the wall by the Big Red Gate, repairing shoes and watching the children in the street.
The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since Pan's death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among now were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao ‑ not the companions of his fate ‑ just people he had fallen in with by accident ‑ nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances ‑ the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighbourhood ‑ these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And so now he was the old widower, the babysitter, the broken‑down old bureaucrat‑poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbours, and he liked his role among them.
Time passed. He continued to teach a few classes, arranging for his seminars to meet out under the valley oaks.
'History!' he would say to them. 'It's a hard thing to get at. There is no easy way to imagine it. The Earth rolls around the sun, three hundred and sixty‑five and a quarter days a year, for year after year. Thousands of these years have passed. Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings. Eventually much of the matter and life on the planet was entrained to their use, and then they had to work out what they wanted to do, beyond merely staying alive. Then they told each other stories of how they had got where they were, what had happened, and what it meant.'
Bao sighed. His students watched him.
'The way Zhu told the story, it is a matter of tragedy for the individual, comedy for the society. Over the long pulses of historical time, reconciliations can be achieved, that's the comedy; but every individual meets a tragic end. We have to admit here that no matter what else we say, for the individual death is always an end and a catastrophe.'
His students regarded him steadily, perfectly willing to admit this, for
they were all about twenty‑five years old, while he was near seventy, and so they felt immortal. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. A very useful function! And it gave the old some amusement as well, as well as an extra pinch from their own mortality to remind them to appreciate life.
So he smiled at their unfounded equanimity, and said, 'But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.'
A young Aozhani woman, come here like so many others did from all around the world, to study agriculture with the old adepts at the college, said, 'But since we are all reincarnated anyway, is death really such a catastrophe?'
Bao felt himself take a long breath. Like most scientifically educated people, he did not believe in reincarnation. It was clearly just a story, something out of the old religions. But still ‑ how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions? How to account for that experience at the Gold Gate, holding his granddaughter aloft?
He thought about it for so long that the students began to look at each other. Then he said carefully to the young woman, 'Well, let us try something. Think that there might be no bardo. No heavens or hells, no afterlife at all. No continuation of your consciousness, or even your soul. Imagine all you are is an expression of your body, and when it finally succumbs to some disorder and dies, you are gone for good. Gone utterly.'
The girl and the others stared at him.
He nodded. 'Then indeed you have to think again what reincarnation
might mean. For we need it. We all need it. And there might be some, way to reconceptualize it so it still has meaning, even if you admit that the death of the self is real.'
'But how?' the young woman said.
'Well, first, of course, there are the children. We are literally reincarnated in new beings, though they are the mix of two previous beings ‑ two beings who will live on in the twistingladders that detach and recombine, passed on to subsequent generations.'
'But that's not our consciousness.'
'No. But consciousness gets reincarnated another way, when the people of the future remember us, and use our language, and unconsciously model their lives on ours, living out some recombination of our values and habits. We live on in the way future people think and talk. Even if things change so much that only the biological habits are the same, they are real for all that ‑ perhaps more real than consciousness, more rooted in reality. Remember, reincarnation means return to a new body.'
'Some of our atoms may do that literally,' one young man offered.
'
Indeed. In the endlessness of eternity, the atoms that were part of our bodies for a time will move on, and be incorporated in other life on this earth, and perhaps on other planets in subsequent galaxies. SO we are diffusely reincarnate through the universe.'
'But that's not our consciousness,' the young woman said stubbornly.
'Not consciousness, nor the self. The ego, the string of thoughts, the flow of consciousness, which no text or image has ever managed to convey ‑ no.'
'But 1 don't want that to end,' she said.
'No. And yet it does. This is the reality we were born into. We can't change it by desire.'
The young man said, 'The Buddha says we should give up our desires.'
'But that too is a desire!' the young woman exclaimed.
'So we never really give it up,' Bao agreed. 'What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible. Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.'
The young students thought it over. There is an age, Bao thought, remembering, there is that time in your life, when you are young and everything seems possible, and you want it all; you are simply bursting
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 75
