TENZIN WHO USED TO BE HANS lives in a shack on the steep bank of a lake. His eyes open at dawn beside a long pane of glass facing the lake in which currents of mist slowly slide and lift over green-leaved grey trees along steep banks, the white skeletons of trees drowned when the river was dammed to form the lake, and the reflected images of all the trees. He is confronted every day with the suffering world at its most beautiful, the spectacle of it spread like a tanka painting at his feet to illustrate Delusion, Impermanence, the Wheel of Life.
Once, after meditating with half-open eyes which had seen nothing but his vision of the Buddha seated in front of him radiating a light which entered him in the form of white nectar, he saw the last sunlit web of mist curl away and a great white tree in the lake slant and subside like a ship into its white wake and vanish under the grey glass. Equanimity: the lake closing its silent lips, every leaf motionless.
He meditates mostly on death. He has a mala for counting mantras: at first sight, a necklace of beans or of carious teeth, white turning yellow and brown-edged, but the beads are of yak bone carved into the shapes of tiny skulls. He sees himself found lying dead here one day with the mala around the bones of his neck, one great skull and one hundred and eight bead ones and he smiles: for all the world like a gift-packed Easter egg.
After nightfall noisy possums and bush rats come round his shack. He spreads jam on bread and leaves it on the verandah, watching eager hands stretch out and snatch. Now and then he comes across a small animal lying dead in the leaves on a track, still plump and richly furred, resonant with blowflies, its mouth and eye-sockets and nostrils a red fretwork where ants are propping and tugging. Bush rats nest inside the walls. His room itself is ratproof. He will not risk the destruction of the Buddha. The rats fight and squeal at night. He wonders if a snake ever finds them and traps them in there. There are snakes around, tiger snakes mostly. He sees them less often than he hears them – a slither in the bracken, a wind fluctuating in the grass on a still day – and is always careful not to risk taking one by surprise. None, as far as he knows, has ever come into the shack, but it has dark corners during the day, and at night his candles and kerosene lamp, while they cast a golden warmth of light around, would not show up a snake.
The shack is in a hidden valley, part of an old overgrown farm being run at a loss – though there is hope for it – as a Dharma centre. Life all over the valley is ascetic, the buildings mostly ramshackle, the food eggs and goats’ milk, rice and lentils and whatever else they can grow. There are power stations in the mountains, but the cost of a line to the valley puts it out of reach. Having no resident lama at the centre, they are glad of a monk, even a novice like Tenzin. The offer came at a time when he was looking for a solitary place to live. In payment for the shack all he needs to do is chop wood a few hours a week, and look after the gompa.
The gompa stands apart at the end of the paddock. The heart of the farm, formally consecrated by an abbot, it has six walls, one for each syllable of the mantra of Tibet, Om Mani Padme Hum, Hail the Jewel in the Lotus; one for each of the realms into which beings are reborn on the Wheel. Blond shingles cap it. Being under that roof is like being inside a pine cone. Twelve rafters, spokes of a wheel, radiate from one great black trunk in the centre; six have a silky gold curtain on a track. The floor is polished pine and when the altar candles are lit their long flickering shapes burn along it. One wall has a vast brick fireplace, beehive shaped like ovens in old Europe. In another wall is the gompa’s only source of daylight, a small, square stained-glass window with a white lotus set in a sea-blue diamond, the rest of the panes clear (as is Ether, Mind) except for a small lozenge of light at each point of the diamond: green for Water, yellow for Earth, red for Fire, blue for Air, for Sky. Hung on a red thread, a faceted pale blue bead glows and magnifies in the white corolla of the lotus. The window catches the rising sun. The jewel in the lotus flashes, and the colours and black lines of the panes spread along the floor like a lance pointing at the fire. Incense and candlesmoke waver past the altars in the waxy sunlight.
At that end of the paddock soft-leaved ginkgo trees have been planted inside wooden cages on which grey-green whiskers of lichen are growing long. A small white monument nearby, a stupa, enshrines the remains of a girl drowned years ago. At the hour when he wakes to go to the gompa, this dim shape among the cages is a child’s white beanie and dress. It has a window in the front in which a brass Buddha sits in meditation, and under it are engraved on a tablet the name and dates and the Perfection of Wisdom mantra. Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Soha. The window is lightly misted, as if the Buddha is breathing inside.
When Tenzin arrived at the beginning of the summer he mistrusted his intense consciousness of the place, accusing himself of letting his senses attach him to its beauty and harmony, when his whole endeavour was to go beyond the senses. Now he in his material body has become one with the place, eating the food grown there and returning his wastes to it, and it seems to him that his mind has made of it a living mandala to be used, like the mandalas and coloured Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the tankas, as images reflected on the surface of the bubble of his emptiness.
The summer is over in the valley before he notices: the brambles in the bracken are hung with blackberries, the tall ragwort stems all over the farm have small flowers. With the first frosts the overloaded quince trees in the old orchard droop and let their woody fruits fall in the wet grass. Like almonds when they first formed, over the summer they have ripened and bulged out smooth and golden all over but for the traces of pale green vernix clinging to their hollows. Blackbirds stand pecking into them, their beaks the same butter yellow.
In autumn, he has been warned, his peace will be invaded. Before or soon after Easter the farm always holds a ten-day retreat. This year a young Tibetan lama is coming from California, one that Tenzin met in India – years ago when he was still Hans – soon after the monasteries in Tibet were destroyed and the boy fled across the Himalayas. They say his English is good now. Because families with babies are coming, Tenzin gives up his shack – wrenched, to his shame, by the loss of it – and takes his books and a few necessities to the small back room of the gompa.
The day before the retreat begins the young lama arrives and the farm people welcome him with tea in the guest quarters and take him to see the gompa. Tenzin pulls the heavy log door open. ‘Tenzin?’ the lama says while they are slipping their boots off. ‘I know you. Have we met before?’
‘Yes, in Dharamsala.’ Tenzin feels his face turn hot with pleasure. ‘Back in the sixties. You wouldn’t remember.’
‘Oh! Long time. Your name I don’t remember.’
‘Hans.’
‘Hans, yes! Did you perhaps have very long hair?’
‘That’s right.’ He runs a rueful hand over the grey-brown stubble on his skull.
‘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 abrupt 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.’
‘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.’
The girl looks at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Well, it’d be bloody cold sleeping in the open, I’ll tell you that,’ the girl says.
‘There’s the main house.’
‘With a dozen people in it, some of them kids.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but the gompa is not a possible place, you should know that.’
‘The retreat’s over, isn’t it? And look! We took our boots off.’
Ignoring an agonised bray of laughter from the boy, he pulls the gold curtains back. ‘The gompa’s a consecrated place,’ he says.
‘Okay. Sorry. I’m not into religion myself. Neither is Adrian, are you? But we didn’t mean to offend anyone.’
‘You haven’t offended me.’
‘Lucky you didn’t catch us last night! Jesus, you gave me a fright. My heart’s still banging.’
That reminds him. ‘I won’t be ringing the wake-up gong today,’ he says, ‘but I’m doing a guru puja. A few people have said they’re coming.’
‘Okay. Sure.’ She shoulders the sleeping-bag. ‘Well, let’s dispose of the evidence. Come on, love.’ She flings an arm round the boy’s shoulders. ‘Cup of tea time, hey.’
Three men come, prostrate three times and sit. They join in when Tenzin chants. The sun rises into the window and still they sit on. After a breakfast of porridge on the lawns, tents are packed, cars rattle down the sunlit hill to the highway. Tenzin stays in the gompa. He has cleaned out the ashes, stacked the cushions and is sweeping over the reflection of the window on the glossy wood when the door creaks. He swings round, expecting the lama, but the valley girl and Adrian are on the doorstep, and she is holding a shaggy bunch of yellow flowers and bronze-green fronds which she hands to him. He stares.
‘Oh, you’re still here,’ she says. ‘We picked these for the gompa. Got a vase?’
He gets an empty jar from his back room and puts it into the boy’s hands. ‘Wait,’ he says, ‘I’ll get some water.’ He fills the jar from the heavy white jug by the altar, and she crams the stems in.
‘Ragwort and bracken. Aren’t they noxious weeds?’ giggles the boy.
‘Yep. It’s what there is here in the valley.’ She leans sideways to brush wisps of grass and leaf out of her brown hair. ‘Where’ll I put them?’
‘On the floor in front of the throne would be best,’ he says.
‘There. They look good, eh? Match the gold silk.’
‘They look very good.’
‘I love flowers. Live ones.’ She fingers the dried chrysanthemums round the candlesticks. ‘Do you live in that little room?’
‘No, in a shack, usually. Down by the lake.’
‘Oh, I know! The one those people with the twins had. They’re going after lunch.’
So he will have his shack back today. In a few hours he will pack his kitbag and go home, put his books and pictures back in their places and himself with them, and it had slipped his mind until now.
‘Good,’ he says aloud. ‘I can pack my things. Move out of here.’
‘Oh, that’s all right.’
‘Yes,’ he says, mystified.
‘No, thanks all the same, there’s no need. We’re going today too.’
Tenzin gapes. The boy jerks his body in his blind, gulping laugh: ‘Last night was our first and last night, father. How sad.’
‘Call me Tenzin.’
‘I like Hans better,’ the girl says.
‘It’s no longer my name.’
‘I don’t get you. You’re not Tibetan. All this dressing up and mumbo jumbo – it’s all very well for the lama, he was born to it. But for you it’s just an act.’
‘Julie!’
‘Oh, he doesn’t mind. Do you?’
‘I don’t mind. But it’s not an act.’
‘That’s what it looks like to me.’
‘That’s the problem, of course. How to tell the form from the substance. If it’s worth trying to do.’
‘All these golden Buddhas. Radiating nectar, isn’t that it? I don’t know. I reckon I’ll stick to nature. This’s beautiful, I suppose. The window, look – it’s lovely.’
‘Yes, I love the window.’
Her finger traces the lead lines of the lotus petals. ‘There aren’t any waterlilies in the lake.’ He shakes his head. ‘Where did they get the idea for this one?’
‘They put it there because there aren’t any in the lake. Idiot,’ giggles the boy.
‘Oh, you!’ She grabs at him and roughly rumples his hair. He dodges, squealing.
‘Are we awful? Don’t you think we’re awful? Look, he’s smiling. We’re his chance to practise forbearance. Bless you my children,’ the boy prates with a papal gesture.
‘If you call be what you are a blessing.’
‘Be what you are? I don’t call that a blessing, it’s a curse. Oedipus! Be what you are!’
‘I think the best –’
‘Heard of the mummy’s curse? That’s nothing, folks. Meet the daddy of all curses!’
‘I think the best way to see it,’ Tenzin says, ‘is as being neither a curse nor a blessing.’
‘Oh well, if the father says it’s neither, of course. But what if it’s both? What then?’
‘Not being a father –’ Tenzin says.
‘Hear that? He’s not my father.’
‘Come on, love. I want a swim in the lake.’
‘In a minute. Not being your father…?’
‘Not being a father, I was going to say, please don’t call me that.’
‘You said you had two kids?’ Julie says quickly.
‘I mean “father” is for priests. Monks aren’t called “father”.’
The boy is gulping in front of them, struggling to speak. His face wrenches. At last he hurls one warding arm over the bristles of his head and stumbles out into the paddock.
‘He’s got this problem, you know?’ the girl says. ‘About his father?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s always on like that about Oedipus? He’s on tranquillisers. I got him to go and talk to the lama and all he did was show us photos of his father. I reckon I’ve helped him a bit. Believe it or not.’
‘I do. Why not?’
‘I know you think I’m a slut.’
‘The longer I live the closer I come to the knowledge,’ he says, ‘that everyone’s everything.’
‘What’s the good of that, though, when everything’s nothing?’
‘Not nothing. Empty.’
‘Same difference, I reckon. What’s this for?’ She fingers the faceted bead, making it flash in the sun. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Pretty though, isn’t it? Like a big drop of water. Well. See you round, hey. Tenzin Hans.’
The boy is face-up in the long grass beyond the stupa, a tiny skull edged with brown. She goes and lies down with an arm across him. Tenzin, replacing the candle-stumps above the door, watches her pull the boy up and lead him through the far gate on to the lake path.
They thought I was offering my room for tonight, he thinks, and feels the rumbles and quivers inside him that had overcome him at his mistake with the young monk. In his heart he is suddenly roaring, rolling on the floor in the grip of pummelling laughter. He is still smiling irresistibly when he starts his walking meditation, pacing with careful slowness clockwise round and round the inside walls of the gompa, treading his wheel. The vision comes into his mind of the young lama cantering joyfully round the paddock in the twilight as the new moon rose and a flute sang. He walks on until his attention has alighted on everything – the flickering Buddhas, the empty paddock through the lotus window, the hollow grate – and so can draw itself in, oblivious. He knows that the task of the mind is to come to the realisation that everything is empty of inherent existence: not that it is nothing, but that it is empty. Nor can the mind come there picking its way through negation, through denial. No, it must take in emptiness whole. And he knows the mind has as much chance of taking in emptiness whole as a drop of water has, say, of taking in the lake…
‘First,’ he says aloud, ‘let the mind be like a drop of water.’
Already with the thought of the lake his mind – the mind is restless – is flying off to the empty shack waiting for him above the mirrored silent trees. Firmly he brings it back inside, walking on.