A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

‘Like straw. You see? I remember.’

  The others are standing waiting inside. The lama hurries in and does his prostrations.

  All day cars come groaning up the hill. The paddock fills up with couples, children, dogs. Coloured tents balloon. Lay people, though dedicated to the Dharma, to his mind they are dabblers as he himself was for years, with barely one hesitant foot on the Path. They carry a long fallen trunk in from the bush – ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho!’ – and erect it on a rise with a rainbow windsock at the top. On the night before the retreat begins they pile dry logs and branches on a mound in the centre of the paddock and light a bonfire. They are burning their past errors. He remembers the bodies on the Burning Ghats at Varanasi; his eyes pick out skulls and exploding ribcages in these flames. Dogs and children run yelling with excitement as if around a fountain that might splash them, and into which they might just jump; sparks spurting out at them sizzle in the damp grass. A new moon rises, a pale line low in the blackness splashed with a milky flow of white sparks. The farm rooster crows; its call echoes, or one across the hill answers. The corpses of trees. Charred logs are still on fire when he wakes in the gompa room, and their shrunken shapes glow red into the next night and morning.

  From now on Tenzin hardly ever has the gompa to himself. Hour-long meditations and discourses alternate from before sunrise to nine at night. The lama’s throne has cushions of gold silk, and a red and orange canopy. On the tabletop at which he sits is a kerosene lamp, a frilled glass vase around the flame, balanced above a full glass belly like a goldfish bowl. His face in this light is brown as if finely carved of wood, his black hair sleek. Glasses hide his eyes. He leans holding up to the lamp his long white sheaves printed in Tibetan. His English is good now. Before each discourse he intones a mantra which everyone chants time and time again, some counting on malas. The discourses are on Wisdom and Compassion and Emptiness and Tenzin has heard it all ten thousand times. The lama takes frequent sips of water. The gompa is crowded with yawning, shifting strangers on cushions and matted sheepskins, rugs round their shoulders; coughs and farts echo. Children sleep, cry out and suck loudly at the breast. Emptiness, Tenzin thinks. Our bodies, our actions, our thoughts – scum on the water of the lake. Rust on the mirror. ‘The mind is restless like a bird,’ the young lama says. Dogs whinge among the shoes left at the doorstep.

  Before dawn each day Tenzin fills the twenty-one offering bowls with water and empties them at night back into a white porcelain jug as large as a goose. He renews and lights the fire and the lamp, the incense and all the candles, red and blue. Then the brass Buddha burns like fire and interlocking waves of light move dimly over the skin of the marble one. On each side of the door is a brass bracket for a candle, lit before he beats the gong for the day’s first meditation. Only a few retreaters come to this session. The lama never comes. Sometimes the fire burns down and a log falls in the grate; sparks spit, and the nearest sitter hastily pokes and settles it down.

  By the second day, the occasional showers have turned into steady rain, the first good rain of the year. Each day the rain is colder, heavier, until on the fifth day there is ice in it and the tops and the long southern slopes of the mountains are white-sprinkled. Snow scattering over the lake, Tenzin thinks, but even if he had time to walk to his shack to see, he would keep away rather than risk an awkward meeting with the family living in it. Their tents flooded out, more and more campers grab their sleeping-bags and creep up into the farmhouse loft, where twenty mattresses are spread on the floor. No one has clean clothes. A sour steam rises from people warming themselves at the fire in the gompa or at the farmhouse. Rain soaks the gompa woodpile. At mealtimes children squabble and cry, their parents shout, everyone stumbles over everyone else in the gloom. Two kerosene lamps burn all day, and a third in the kitchen, but their rich light barely reaches through their glass. Angry mothers kneel by the fire to change napkins, spilling brown curds, and get soaked rushing round to the bath-house to wash their hands. ‘Oh, yuk,’ children yell, waving their soup spoons. Every morning someone treads in human turds half-splashed into the grass round the farmhouse.

  The young lama keeps to his quarters, striding, sodden robes flapping at his ankles, over the paddock to the gompa for each session, returning straight after. He will stop for a chat if someone is hovering; he will give a child a push on the swing or a riddling answer for a riddle; anyone is free to make an appointment to ask him in private about a problem, and many do. Not Tenzin, who has no problem he could frame in words, and who senses in the lama a need for solitude as strong as his own. He wonders if the lama is feeling the cold; he himself loves winter weather.

  On the sixth day at last the sky clears. From then on the days, cold at first, full of mist lifting in layers from the folds of the hills, are flooded by midmorning with hot, still sunlight. The thin gum trees are strung together high overhead with fine white webs that vanish when the sun reaches in. The tents are pitched again, lines of coloured washing slung between trees. Through the bush the lake glitters, its surface motionless. The gompa, a hive full of light and warmth while it rained, turns into a hood of darkness now. Fewer people turn up, always the same ones. Discourses and meditations, one follows the other: these days are a time out of time. Wheeling blowflies sing Om.

  One early morning, as he pushes open the door from his room into the gompa – ashes and cloying incense, a red glint among sprawled logs in the grate – he sees the candles already burning and in their light a bald maroon figure sitting in meditation, a shadowy tree-tall monk. ‘An emanation!’ he exclaims aloud. Has his piety achieved such power already? The figure stands and its teeth gleam. A flesh and blood monk! He must have travelled up overnight. Tenzin is seized with sudden harsh convulsions, his face gapes, he chokes, he roars. His eyes ache and weep.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Laughing,’ explains Tenzin. He wipes his eyes.

  ‘I gathered that!’ The strange face peering down at Tenzin is very young, smooth and blank.

  And Tenzin, who has had to remind himself that this is laughing: ‘I took you for an emanation!’

  ‘So I am,’ says the monk with a grin.

  ‘So we all are. So is everything.’ Tenzin has recovered himself.

  ‘I’m Ben.’

  ‘Tenzin.’ He sees the other hide his surprise. ‘Most people keep their old names, I know,’ he says. ‘I prefer not to.’ They smile and the other sits and crosses his legs. Tenzin does his three prostrations and sits beside him. The candles burn straight and high. Their breathing disturbs the candles as little as a fish disturbs the lake.

  To the huddled families this visitor must seem even more remote and cold than Tenzin does; they leave him alone with his thoughts. Tenzin is awed by such asceticism in one so young. Married life, jobs, children – he himself had all that, before he turned his back on it. He last saw his wife ten years ago, when his daughter was about fifteen, his boy seven or eight. They matter as little now as if they really were from a previous life (he won the battle against his disbelief in reincarnation, in karma, long ago); if they remember him, they have no idea where or who he is now. He is glad of the young monk’s presence and of his remoteness. Enough, he thinks, that we, the two of us, serve as each other’s witness and refuge.

  Still, now that his shack is occupied, he has to have his one meal a day in the farmhouse, with everyone else except the lama, who eats in private. Tenzin takes his plate to a seat by the fire as night falls – the young monk nowhere to be seen – and observes the chattering retreaters, the children, the valley people there to cook and their friends there out of curiosity. Some of these come to the gompa from time to time to hear what the lama has to say. One, a thickset rowdy girl, has the same name as his daughter, Julie. He wonders from time to time if it could be his daughter. A white-faced boy or man – he is thirty, Tenzin has overheard him say – always lies close to the fire with his bristled red head in his arms and almost in the ashes, looking up now and then to ask an a
brupt question. He disconcerts most people, laughing in bursts, closing his shiny black eyes, resting his face gently against their legs like their own small children. But the valley girl has taken to giving him cigarettes and going for walks with him.

  ‘What’s your name? I mean your real name?’ she asks Tenzin by the fire one night.

  ‘What’s “real”?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, you know what she means!’ The boy rolls over on the hearth. ‘Your given name. Originally.’

  ‘Hans.’

  ‘Hans? What nationality’s that?’

  ‘It could be several. I was born in Austria, though, and have been an Australian for over thirty years.’

  ‘Must be older than you look, then.’

  ‘I was a child when I came. Not that I’m saying I’m young! I have two grown-up children. The girl would be about your age.’ He stifles the impulse to say her name. What if my daughter is this slovenly, bold, ignorant child-woman, he thinks, dismayed. Better not to know.

  ‘So you’re married ?’

  ‘Divorced. A long time ago.’

  ‘My father divorced my mother,’ the boy said, ‘so he could marry someone else. Younger.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘She went out of her mind.’ He writhes and hisses. ‘Isn’t that a silly saying? Maybe I went out of my mind too so I could be where she was! Didn’t work, though. Nothing does, does it?’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Tenzin wishes he could be eating his rice and quinces in peace on the verandah of his shack, the lake flowing white through its drowned trees.

  ‘Well, I want to kill my father.’

  ‘That’s quite common,’ mumbles Tenzin with his mouth full.

  ‘Oh, don’t I know it! I could set up as a shrink myself by now. Oedipus Rex! Oedipus Adrian! Doctor Oedipus Adrian!’ His milky face is convulsed. ‘I came here,’ he whispers when he gets his breath back, ‘to find help. Will I ever get well?’

  Tenzin is wrung with sorrow and shame. ‘When the time comes,’ is all he can say.

  ‘What time?’

  Tenzin opens helpless hands over the fire.

  The last meditation on the last day of the retreat ends at noon. By sundown half of the people have packed and left. The tall young monk might have been an emanation, for all Tenzin has seen of him. The family in his shack is still there; Adrian as well, and the valley girl, Julie; and the young lama, who can relax for a couple of days now before his lecture tour. He asks if he can go riding so Julie catches the farm’s one horse, a fat blond mare, and saddles her for him. Laughing with pleasure, he changes out of his long robes into jeans and a shirt to ride her round the paddock.

  ‘Watch out for Ivory,’ Julie yells. ‘She’ll throw you if she gets the chance.’

  ‘Not me! No way I’m being a flying lama!’ he shouts back. With a wave and a whoop he nudges her into a canter.

  ‘His family are nomads,’ Tenzin says beside Julie, and she swings round. ‘They herd yaks and sheep in the Himalayas and the ponies they ride there are half-wild.’

  ‘Oh, I know all that. He showed me the photos from his trip home.’ Julie grins. ‘Hey, you want to have a go too?’

  ‘Me? No! I can’t ride.’

  ‘Flying monk!’ the boy says.

  ‘Ivory’s fat.’ Julie blows smoke in the air. ‘She needs riding oftener.’

  ‘That’s the way to lose weight, eh, Julie? Want to try it?’

  ‘Oh, ha ha.’

  With the darkness a mist is slowly filling the valley. Children are being fed inside. Outside, everyone is watching the circling rider and the faint new moon coming up behind him over the hill. Someone has a flute and plays a shrill, rhythmic tune on it that falters away when the lamps and the fire are lit.

  At the shack Tenzin has a tape of Tibetan priests chanting Om. He would like to be there again now, alone and free to play it out loud in the middle of the night, while the mist lay on the lake. When he does that, the great echo growls back from the mountains over the water to where he stands, also chanting back: Aaa-uuu-mmmm. Soon, he thinks.

  That night no one comes to meditate. Long after the candles have been doused and the screen put in place in front of the red ashes in the grate and Tenzin has gone to bed, he hears the heavy outside door creak open. Someone has come to sit after all, he thinks, someone troubled enough to want to pass the night in meditation. But no, he hears giggles, then a thud, and footsteps come padding across the wooden floorboards. ‘Where are you?’ he hears the boy Adrian say, and he knows in a flash that it had to be Adrian. He goes to his door, which is not quite shut – he can just see the hollow hive of the firelit gompa – and is about to say softly, ‘Here,’ when he sees the girl. Wrapped in a sheepskin, she is crouched spreading a sleeping-bag in front of the fire.

  ‘Over here,’ she says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here by the fire. Come on.’

  Tenzin stops short, frozen with outrage, while she rummages among his logs stacked ready for the morning, stirring up the embers and making a wigwam out of sticks. ‘Ah,’ says the boy, holding his hands out bright red in the flames.

  ‘Enjoy.’

  ‘I don’t think we should, Julie.’

  ‘No one’s going to know, are they? What they don’t know won’t hurt them.’

  ‘What about the monk?’

  ‘We’ll get up real early,’ she murmurs, ‘before he gets here. How about I pull these curtains across?’

  ‘No. All that gold silk.’

  ‘They’d hold the warmth in.’

  ‘No. It’s enough as if I’m on stage without that.’

  ‘On stage? Why? All the Buddhas watching, you mean? They’ve seen it all.’ She is cross-legged as if in the lotus position, rubbing something in her lap with her fingers. Her face flares as she strikes a match. Smoke drifts from a cigarette.

  ‘On stage as someone else. Oh, you got some more. Oh, thank God.’ He slumps over and lays his head in her lap for her to put the cigarette between his lips. Silence. Then: ‘Oh, God. Why are you so nice to me?’

  ‘I like you.’

  ‘Nobody likes me. They put up with me. I hate people.’

  ‘No me.’

  ‘Not you.’

  Tenzin sniffs: he knows dope when he smells it. I should storm into the gompa and throw them out, he thinks. No, tell them more in sorrow than in anger that this is a consecrated place and they have to go. The thought of how the boy would reel away in anguish at such a rejection holds him back. Is this compassion, then? Does compassion compel him to let them be? Where does wisdom lie? Compassion is all very well, he thinks, but if I let this go on, what’s to stop others? What’s to stop an orgy in here? Where’s the line to be drawn?

  Not here, he decides. Much as I hate myself for letting the gompa be used as a bedroom, I’ll hate myself more if I cast this boy out. So he stands transfixed while they undress murmuring to each other with dreamy slowness, and the smoke drifts over the firelight.

  As he watches the girl languidly seats herself across the boy’s spread thighs and puts her arms around him, her head so far back as he kisses her long throat that her hair covers the arm that is holding her to him. Tenzin feels the familiar delicious stiffening under his robes. What does this remind him of? Of making love himself, yes, but it’s something more. Of course: they are the Buddha and his consort, they are the yabyum, like in the tanka: Wisdom and Compassion in eternal ecstatic embrace. They too are an emanation, he thinks, remembering the tall young monk. So are we all. Slow candlelight and firelight shift, red and gold, over them rocking and then lying down apart, both shiny with wet light, panting.

  A muffled squeal makes him jump. ‘What’s that? A scorpion!’ the girl says, crouching. One must have run out of the fireplace and been crawling shadowy on the glow of the polished floor towards them.

  ‘Don’t kill it!’ The boy sits up.

  ‘No, okay.’ She takes some newspaper from the fireplace and pushes the heavy door open to
flap it outside, her buttocks in the air, huge, quince-golden and downy. ‘Ooh! Brrr!’ she says, shutting it again, hugging her breasts and hurrying back to the fire and the boy. He is lying still, face-down. Humming, she runs her hands over his shoulders and back.

  A fierce pang of envy takes the watcher by surprise. He has a vision of himself creeping forward into the firelight to put himself in her hands; of her with her silent head bent, hair falling dark around her face as she opens his maroon wrappings and touches his skin. Shocked, he steps back noiselessly. His room is blackness. He gropes to his bed and lies in it. A shameful lapse, he thinks. Of course, I’m only a novice. No, stop: no self-abnegation. That would be a further lapse, to make too much of it. No looking back. Equanimity. Restless as a bird. Take long slow breaths, observe the breath. Their rambling murmurs from the gompa lull him.

  It is still dark when he wakes and with a smothered groan remembers the visitors. The girl said they would have gone before he could find them: he hopes so. But the gold curtains have been pulled across. Against the glow of the embers he can just make out a long quilted mound. Someone in it starts snuffling heavily. He takes a handful of shoulder, the girl’s, and shakes it. ‘Wake up,’ he says.

  ‘Mmmm?’ She sits up abruptly. ‘Oh! Oh shit! Hey!’ She shakes the bag. ‘Wake up, will you. Hey! He’s here.’

  ‘Please, get dressed straight away. I’ll be in my room. That’s my room there. I’d like to talk to you before you go.’

  He turns on his heel. They seem to have no idea that he was awake and knew they were there during the night. Good. He can choose whether he tells them or not. Not, he decides. What would be the point? To tell would just be a further invasion of privacies, mine, theirs.

  They are doing up buttons and folding the sleeping-bag when he comes back in.

  ‘Sorry.’ The girl looks up. ‘With all these people everywhere, this was the only possible place.’ She shrugs.

  ‘Are you shocked? I bet you think we’re a bit off.’ The boy rocks and grins. ‘Disgusting!’

  ‘Most people prefer, don’t they, to go somewhere no one can see or hear them.’