I TOOK A WALK around the estate. Sonam Tserang, Aryi, and Sangye Dolma were surrounded by servants, all looking as proud as if they were no longer menials.
The old executioner bowed deeply. “Young Master, my son has a future with you.”
Sonam Tserang’s mother pressed her forehead against my boots, and said tearfully, “That’s how I feel about my son too, Young Master.”
The old woman’s snot and drool would have soiled my boots if I hadn’t walked off quickly.
People in the yard greeted me with fervent shouts, but I didn’t feel like handing out candy today. Then I spotted the historian. During all the time I’d been away from home, I’d thought more about our tongueless historian than about anyone in my family. He was sitting beneath a walnut tree at the edge of the yard, smiling at me. I could tell from his eyes that he’d missed me too.
“Well done,” he said with his eyes.
I walked up to him, and asked, “Did they tell you about me?”
“News travels fast.”
“Did you write it all down in your notebook?”
He nodded earnestly, looking much better than when he’d first become the historian after getting out of the dungeon.
I removed a gift from under my billowy robe and laid it in front of him.
It was a rectangular, hard-shelled briefcase, commonly carried by Han military officers. In studying them carefully, I’d seen that they put their notebooks, pens, and eyeglasses in briefcases like this, and I had told someone in the trading team to get one from the Han military. Inside were a pair of eyeglasses with crystalline lenses, a fountain pen, and a stock of pretty notebooks with plastic covers.
Normally, the sight of such lavishly delicate objects ruffled lamas, since they detracted from the study of Buddhism and life’s vicissitudes. But our historian was no longer a zealous monk interested only in spreading his faith. Neither of us knew how to fill the pen with ink. We uncapped it and screwed the cap back on several times, but were still unable to get ink into the pen. In the face of such an ingenious object, even the wise Wangpo Yeshi turned into an idiot.
He smiled. “In the past,” his eyes said, “I’d have refused this ingenious object.”
“But now you want it to work.” He nodded.
In the end, it was the chieftain’s wife who came out and filled the pen with ink. As she was leaving, she kissed me and smiled at the historian. “My son brought back wonderful things for all of us. He gave you an American fountain pen. Use it well.”
The historian wrote a line on a piece of paper. My God! It was blue. We’d only seen writing in black before. As he gazed at his writing, the color of the sky, he moved his lips.
I was amazed to hear a sound.
Yes, it was a sound from a man with no tongue.
No, he didn’t simply make a sound, he actually said something. He was speaking!
Although the voice was muffled, he was clearly speaking. He heard it too. With a surprised look on his face, he pointed to his wide-open mouth, and asked with his eyes, “Was that me talking? Was I speaking?”
I said, “It was you! It was! Say something else.”
He nodded and spoke again. It was halting, and muffled, but I understood what he said. “Those . . . words . . . are . . . pretty.”
I shouted into his ear, “You said the words are pretty.”
He nodded. “Your . . . pen . . . my . . . hand write . . . beautifully.”
“My God! You’re talking!”
“I . . . am . . . talking?”
“You are!”
“I . . . talked?”
“You did!”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Wangpo Yeshi’s face was twisted with rapture. He tried to stick out his tongue to examine it, but it was only half there, not long enough to reach his lips. When he couldn’t see it, teardrops splashed out of the corners of his eyes.
I shouted at the crowd, “The tongueless one is talking again!”
The people in the yard quickly spread the word.
“The tongueless one is talking again!”
“The tongueless one is talking again?”
“Yes. He’s talking again!”
“He’s talking again!”
“Talking again?”
“Talking again!”
“The historian is talking again.”
“The tongueless one is talking again!”
They pressed up to us, while swiftly relaying the startling news to those behind them. It was a miracle; their faces glowed and their eyes sparkled, as if they were part of the miracle. Living Buddha Jeeka came as soon as he heard the news. I hadn’t seen him for some years. He had aged noticeably; the pink glow was gone from his face, and now he walked with a handsome cane.
Either because he was too excited or too anxious, Wangpo Yeshi was trembling, and sweat beaded his forehead. Yes, a miracle had occurred on Maichi land. A tongueless person had spoken! By now, the chieftain’s entire family had joined the crowd, looking very apprehensive, unsure if this sign portended good fortune or bad. Every time something unusual happened, someone was quick to provide an interpretation. Everyone now waited quietly for that someone to do just that.
The Living Buddha walked out of the crowd and announced to Chieftain Maichi and everyone else, “This is a sign of the gods’ favor, brought to us by the second young master. Wherever he goes, the gods will send down a miracle.”
To hear him talk, you’d have thought I was the one who had spoken without a tongue.
The taut faces of the Maichi family members relaxed as soon as the Living Buddha made his pronouncement. Except for my brother, the members of my family felt they had to display something to the miracle maker. They all fell in behind Father as he walked up to me solemnly, so slowly that I nearly burst with anxiety.
But before he reached me, a pair of strong men lifted me onto their shoulders, and suddenly I was riding above hundreds of bobbing heads amid deafening cheers. I towered over the crowd, drifting on an ocean of human heads and tossed by raging waves of human voices. Then the two men began to run, whisking me past one upturned face after another, including those of the chieftain’s family. But only briefly, for they quickly floated off like leaves and disappeared in the crowd. Even so, I saw Father’s fear, Mother’s tears, and my wife’s dazzling smile. And I also saw the one who could speak without a tongue, standing quietly just beyond the sudden whirlwind in the yard and becoming part of the dense shade beneath the walnut tree.
After the excited crowd made several turns around the yard carrying me, they turned and rushed off toward the barley field like floodwaters crashing through a broken levee. Sunlight washed over the ripe kernels of grain, wave after wave. I was swept into a sea of gold along with the crowd.
I wasn’t afraid, but wondered where all that exhilaration had come from.
Kernels of ripe grain kicked up by so many feet pelted my face, stinging it so badly that I began to scream. But the people kept running, as if crazed. The kernels turned into red-hot sparks. The Maichi barley field, of course, didn’t go on forever, and finally the crowd emerged from the far end, at the foot of a mountain, where vast patches of azalea bushes blocked their way. The waves crested a few times before the crowd stopped, reluctantly, their energy spent.
When I looked behind me, a large patch of the barley was gone. On the other side of the trampled field was the estate house, Chieftain Maichi’s magnificent house. It looked lonely, as if it didn’t know what to do with itself. An unknown sadness rose up inside me. The flood of serfs, the people, had swept me away, leaving other members of the Maichi family behind. I could see them still in the yard. They must have been wondering what had happened or they wouldn’t have been standing there in a daze. I didn’t know why it had all happened either, but I sensed that something serious had occurred to put such a distance between them and me. It took so little time to widen the distance that I’d had no time to think about it, and now it was going to be hard to draw close to them again. The people around me lay in the meadow after collapsing from exhaustion. I was pretty sure they had no idea why they’d done what they’d just done. Even if there were miracles in this world, the common people could not share in them. That sort of madness was a lot like sleeping with a woman—the climax is also its end. Excitement, elation, running wild, only to wind up sprawled on the ground, like clumps of wet mud.
My two young servants were also sweat-soaked, their foolish mouths hanging slack like beached fish. They wore the same foolish smile that so often adorned my own face.
The sun was warming up, so the people got to their feet and walked off in twos and threes. By noon, only the three of us were left—Sonam Tserang, Aryi, and me.
We turned and headed back to the house.
The barley field was so vast that I stank from sweat by the time we reached the end.
The yard was deserted, except for Wangpo Yeshi, who was still sitting where we’d met earlier that morning. The estate was deathly silent. I wished someone would come out to look around, or make a noise, or something. The bright autumn sun reflecting off the massive stone wall made it look like iron. Now that the sun was overhead, shadows curled around my feet like thieves, not willing to unfold and show themselves.
Wangpo Yeshi looked at me, his expression changing constantly.
Ever since losing his tongue, he had developed a rich repertoire of facial expressions. In that brief moment, his face revealed all four seasons, as well as wind, rain, thunder, and lightning.
He didn’t speak this time; instead he continued to talk with his eyes. “Young Master returned, just like that?”
“Just like that.” I’d wanted to say that the people had swept me away like a flood, then disappeared from the vast field. But I didn’t, because I couldn’t express the significance behind the event or of other things I really wanted to say. The flood was a metaphor, but what’s the meaning of a metaphor? A metaphor is meaningless if it’s nothing but a metaphor.
“Don’t you know that a miracle has occurred?”
“You spoke.”
“You’re a true idiot, Young Master.”
“Sometimes.”
“You were carried off like water by the miracle.”
“They were like a flood.”
“Did you sense the power?”
“An overwhelming, uncontrollable power.”
“Because it had no direction.”
“Direction?”
“You didn’t point the way for them.”
“My feet weren’t on the ground and I was dizzy.”
“You were up high, and the people need someone up high to point the way for them.”
I believed that I was starting to see the light. “Did I miss an opportunity?”
“Do you really not want to be a chieftain?”
“Let me think. Do I want to be a chieftain?”
“I mean the Maichi chieftain.”
Standing beneath the scorching noonday sun, the second young master of the Maichi family racked his brain while the estate remained silent. Finally, I shouted toward the house, “Yes, I do!”
The blindingly white sunlight quickly absorbed my shout.
Wangpo Yeshi stood up, and said aloud, “Miracles . . . do . . . not . . . occur . . . twice.”
Now I understood. Had I but waved my hand, the flood would have swept away everything blocking my path to becoming the chieftain. The flood would have washed away even the estate house if I had simply waved my hand. But I was an idiot and, instead of pointing the way, I’d let them spend their powerful energy in the vast barley field until the final cresting wave crashed into the azalea bushes at the foot of the mountain.
I dragged myself back to my room, and still no one came out to meet me, not even my wife. I lay down on my bed, and heard one boot drop to the floor, then another. The sound reverberated in my ears and in my heart. I asked myself, “Was it a miracle or was it a flood?”
Then, with my ears ringing with the echo of the flood, I fell asleep.
I woke up to dim lamplight.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Don’t ask me.” It was Tharna’s voice.
“Who am I?”
“You’re an idiot, a complete idiot.” That was Mother.
The two women stood beside my bed, their heads bowed, as if unwilling to look at me. I didn’t dare look them in the eye either. A tremendous sense of sorrow rose up inside me.
Tharna was the one who understood what I was asking. “Do you know where you are now?” she said.
“I’m at home.”
“Do you know who you are?”
“I’m an idiot, the Maichi family idiot.” Tears flowed when I said that. Teardrops slipped down my face. I heard them fall and I heard my explanation. “We can’t hurry things. I know we can’t, but events are moving too fast.”
Mother said, “You two had better return to the border. That’s where you belong.” She added that she’d come to live with her son when the current chieftain was “gone.” Knowing that a sleepless night awaited me, she filled the oil lamp for us before leaving.
My wife began to cry. I’d heard women cry before, but none had ever made me feel so miserable. The hours crawled that night. Never before had I been so keenly aware of the existence of time. Tharna cried herself to sleep, and continued sobbing as she dreamed. The sad look on her face excited me, but I sat still under the lamplight. The heat left my body after a while, and a chill set in. Then Tharna woke up. At first she was very gentle. “Idiot, are you just sitting there?”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Yes, I am.”
Now that she was completely awake, she shrank back under the blanket as she thought about what had happened during the day. Her eyes turned cold, and tears began to flow again. After a while, she fell back to sleep. I didn’t feel like going to bed—I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. So I went for a walk.
I saw a light in Father’s window. The estate was shrouded in silence, but I knew something was happening somewhere. Earlier that day, there was a moment when I could have settled things, but night had fallen, and everything was different. Now others would do the deciding.
The moon traveled leisurely in the sky; with events now moving so slowly, time followed suit. Who said I was an idiot? I felt the passage of time, and that is not something an idiot can do.
Back inside, the lamp oil ran out. Moonbeams lit up the room.
Then they too disappeared. Sitting in the dark, I tried to find something to think about, such as what I’d do when another day arrived. But I couldn’t think of a thing. The crippled steward had once said that thinking about things was the same as talking to oneself. But it was hard for me to do that without making a sound. How can you talk without making a sound? Yet that might have been interpreted to mean that I’d never thought about things before, even though I had. It’s just that I’d never focused on anything in particular; I’d just thought. When I tried to focus my mind, which was the same as talking softly to myself, my mind went blank. So I sat in the dark, listening to Tharna’s deep, steady breathing, interrupted from time to time by sobs. Then even the darkness thinned out.
For the first time in my life, I watched how dawn arrived.
Tharna was awake, but she pretended she was still sound asleep. I sat there. A while later, Mother came in with a gloomy look on her face, which meant that she hadn’t slept either. “Dear son,” she repeated, “go back to the border region. Either that or go to Tharna’s place, and take your things with you.”
Now that someone was talking to me, I was able to think. “I don’t want those things.”
Tharna got out of bed. Her breasts didn’t seem as if they were part of her body; they looked more like bronze sculptures that had been affixed to her. They shone like the bronze pigeons we kept in our dining room cupboard. As she dressed in a long satin robe, the morning sun flowed over her. You never saw that on other women. Sunlight would shine on them, but never flow over them.
Even the troubled chieftain’s wife said, “No woman is as beautiful as your wife.”
Rather than respond, Tharna looked at herself in the mirror. “Given the way my husband is, one day someone might steal his wife away from him.”
The chieftain’s wife sighed.
Tharna laughed. “When that happens, you’ll be an idiot to be pitied.”