Fast and Slow

LIFE ON THE BORDER passed in a relaxed fashion.

I lived in the same room all those years, seeing the same ceiling every morning when I woke up. The swirling patterns of the grained wood would be right there in front of me, even if I didn’t open my eyes. And the land outside the window always had the same undulating lines. The sun rose for the thousandth time and set for the thousandth time. I woke up every day in the same shaft of light streaming in through the window, and those two everlasting questions no longer bothered me.

I can’t recall if this occurred in the second year or the third.

That morning, Tharna, her arm propped against the pillow, was studying me closely. When she saw me wake up, she bent down to fix her searching eyes on mine. Her breasts rubbed against my face, sending a strong feminine aroma into my nostrils. She kept staring into my eyes, as if trying to see inside me, but I was preoccupied by the smell of her body. We had been sleeping in the same bed for many years, but this was the first time I realized that her body had such a tantalizing fragrance when the morning light streamed in. She smelled good, even without perfume. Normally, though, she used lots of perfume, so I’d thought she stank like other women.

The smell from Tharna’s body made me giddy and I began to gasp, as if being smothered. Tharna laughed and then blushed as her hand snaked its way down my chest, brushed past my belly, and held my burning erection, which I thought seared her hand because she shuddered. “Ah!” Her body was on fire. Tharna was a good rider, and now she mounted me deftly, as if climbing into a saddle. Her body rose and fell, carrying us—horse and rider—to the far end of the sky.

Something flew past my eyes—maybe it was scenery or maybe it was just colorful bubbles. I heard myself whinny like a stud horse.

My rider also screamed from the saddle.

Finally, horse and rider crashed down, stuck together by sweat. Then the sweat dried, and I heard the tinkle of bees hitting the window glass.

Tharna put her lips to my cheek, and said, “We forgot to ask your questions.”

“I know where and who I am,” I said.

She sat up in bed, her face and breasts glowing bewitchingly in the morning light. She asked loudly, “Do you know who you are?”

I jumped out of bed, onto the rug, and answered her in a commanding voice.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“In the place where I’m waiting to be the chieftain.”

With the blanket over her back, Tharna joined me on the rug, where we lay naked, wrapped in each other’s arms. It was on that morning when she promised she’d stop taking the tablets that kept her from getting pregnant. I asked what she’d do if I turned out to be a real idiot. I wasn’t trying to be funny.

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Anyone who’s waiting to be chieftain of two places cannot be an idiot.”

I had always considered those around me to be smarter than I, especially the beautiful Tharna. If intelligence were the ultimate affirmation of a person, I would not have hesitated to declare her the smartest person in the world.

But great sex between husband and wife when time was passing so slowly is not what I want to talk about. Yes, my nose was filled with the tantalizing fragrance of a woman, but there’s something I want to say, and since I find it hard to start right in talking about an important matter, let me use a metaphor. I am by a lake watching swans fly through the sky. They try to fly high, but they must frantically flap their wings while dragging bodies that are so heavy they worry me. They paddle fiercely across the surface of the water before finally rising into the air.

What I want to say is, one day I began to notice how slowly time passed on this land.

I’m perfectly happy to talk to people about things I notice, a desire that was likely caused by the fact that I rarely noticed anything. The historian, Adviser Huang, and the crippled steward were all good discussion partners. The historian was the best. It was during this period that time began to speed up. After our discussions, I found myself agreeing more with the historian, who now believed that time passed faster not because the sun had quickened its pace in the sky. (The sun never changes, even if we judge the speed of time with its rising and setting.) The speed of time is different only if we compare it against events. He said that the more events that occurred, the faster time passed.

As time quickened, I began to feel giddy, like riding a fast horse. I’d first become aware of things during the year when the Maichi family began growing opium and had gotten used to the abnormal rate of bizarre occurrences.

In the years following the death of my brother, I lived on the border, collecting taxes and running a bank, a time when nothing seemed to happen on the other chieftains’ lands. After the madness of the opium planting and the longest and most widespread famine in our history, an extended period of anxiety, the land relaxed, like a woman who has just given birth, and fell into a dazed slumber. The chieftains were like hibernating bears, hiding out on their own estates and not showing their faces.

Not a single chieftain came to see me on the border, where so many people were forever coming and going. There was a lot they could have learned there, but they were afraid to come after the catastrophe they’d met when they followed Chieftain Maichi’s example of growing opium. Once the famine had passed, they simply hid away, unwilling to meet us.

But that wasn’t worth worrying about. My servants told me what a bright future I had: one day I’d be the chieftain of both the Maichi and Rongong families. They said that I’d used intelligence to win the hand of Chieftain Rongong’s only daughter, and that it was my good fortune that the killer had slain my brother.

But what made me happiest of all were the frequent letters from my uncle. I’d sent him one silver draft after another from my account.

Uncle sent me two photographs.

One showed him with the late Panchen Lama. He sent the other, showing him with a group of White Chinese generals, when he received my first money draft. They were standing on a flat, barren land, with several large objects in the background. Adviser Huang identified them as airplanes, or iron birds, which could shoot from the sky at the people below. I asked him how many airplanes a hundred thousand silver dollars could buy. He said maybe a wing. So I told him to send another hundred thousand immediately. I liked the idea of having two iron wings in China’s sky. Uncle said that the Chinese emperor had once been our emperor, so the Chinese government was now our government. Adviser Huang told me that the country would be strong again after it won the war.

I asked if there was some way for Uncle to see me.

He said all we had to do was buy a camera. Time passed even more slowly while I waited for the camera to arrive. One day now took longer than three. But finally, the camera came. Adviser Huang also found a photographer. Then time started to pass more quickly. We took many pictures, at all sorts of places and at all times; we went mad over it. Since the photographer did not want to stay at the border permanently, I told Aryi to learn the man’s skills. Among the servants I liked, the young executioner was the only one with any sort of skill. So who else should learn photography, if not him? I rejected the historian’s request to learn photography, which he said also recorded history. For me, photography was just a skill, and his hands were meant to hold pen and paper, not a camera.

Let me relate a funny thing that happened.

One day Aryi came running and shrieking out of the photographer’s darkroom, his face twisted in terror.

Sonam Tserang asked him if the photographer had made a move on his warm rear end. Our photographer had never shown any interest in women, which had people saying that he liked boys. For some strange reason, Aryi had always appealed to men who liked men. But that sort of encounter could not have produced such awful shrieks, any more than they could have come from a woman who encountered a man she’d rejected. And that is not what happened that day. As he ran out of the darkroom, Aryi shouted, “Ghost! A ghost came out of a piece of paper the photographer put in water.”

With a laugh, the adviser told him it wasn’t a ghost, but an image developed from the film. So I went in to see how the photographer developed his film. The images materialized slowly on the paper under a special light, and even though they looked a little strange, I couldn’t say they were particularly scary. But it scared the piss and a few loud farts out of my future executioner, and people laughingly called him a scaredy-cat. When he was carrying out his duties as executioner, he’d never acted anything like that. After a while, the photographer left and Aryi took over. But he never went into the darkroom alone.

Now that we had a camera, our days flew by. I sent the first picture to Uncle at Chongqing.

I don’t recall the year, but it was an unusually hot summer when Uncle wrote to invite me to visit him in the fall, once the days got cooler. Adviser Huang said that victory in the War of Resistance was in sight, and that the newly unified country would be stronger than ever. During the decades after the fall of the emperor, the chieftains felt abandoned; now things would be different. The steward told me that Uncle wanted me to meet some high officials who had traveled to places near us during the war. Now that the war was coming to an end, they’d soon be leaving. Once they did, I would have to travel great distances if I wanted to meet them. The historian said that I could guess my uncle’s intentions by combining the interpretations of the steward and the adviser. Time slowed as I waited for fall to arrive.

Tharna’s passion for photography was intense; that, combined with her constant dealings with the tailor, kept her so occupied that she left me alone most of the time.

People said that the young master was getting stupid again when they saw me staring at the edge of the sky, not knowing that I hoped to be the first to see fall arrive. I wanted to see when the first frost turned the trees a shiny gold, since that would be the time for me to get on the road.

Chieftain Maichi sent me a letter. We had not communicated since I left the estate. The letter, a short one, asked what I’d been up to at the border. Since everyone thought it unnecessary to mention my planned trip to Chongqing, I wrote back, telling him only about photography. There was no need for me to send a long letter, since his was so short. Another letter quickly followed. After saying that Mother missed me, he asked why the chieftain’s son hadn’t thought about sharing the novelty item with his father.

“To hell with him,” Tharna commented.

Everyone knew that she was a willful woman. But I was different. I wanted to hear the rest of the letter. Following a bunch of meaningless nonsense, the chieftain asked if I could return to the estate sometime to take pictures of the mistress.

“While we’re at it”—that’s how he ended the letter. “While we’re at it, we can discuss the future. I’m beginning to feel my age.”

Once before he had felt himself getting old, but had later recovered his vigor.

So I decided not to go, and sent Aryi back with the camera instead.

Aryi stayed a few days, taking lots of pictures. When he was about to return to the border, the chieftain repeated that he was getting old and that his vitality and wisdom were waning. Aryi said, “Master, the young master told me to ask if you’d be young again if he died.”

Soon afterward, Aryi returned with the camera and that bashful look of his.

He also brought back a letter filled with complaints and bitterness. Father said that he’d have discussed plans for the Maichi chieftainship with me had I gone back myself. But I hadn’t, which meant that I, not he, didn’t care about the family’s future.

On that same day I received another letter, written not by Uncle, but by a Han general.

This letter said that my uncle, a great Tibetan patriot, had been on a trip somewhere when his boat was bombed by a Japanese airplane, and that he was now missing.

I realized that the Han people weren’t all that different from us. Instead of delivering bad news directly, which could bring only sadness, they’d couched it in terms that struck a less painful nerve. Rather than say that my uncle had been killed by a Japanese bomb, and that his body had not been found, they’d used the nicer-sounding word—missing.

Maybe because of that word, my pain was not as great as it might have been.

I said to the servants, “He gave himself a water burial.”

“Don’t be too sad, Young Master.”

“Now we don’t have to go to Chongqing.”

“We don’t know who Uncle wanted us to see.”

“The general who wrote the letter didn’t extend an invitation.”

“I don’t want to give them any more silver for airplanes.”

Not long after that, the Japanese surrendered.

I heard that the stumpy Japanese accepted their defeat on some ship, and that the Red Chinese and the White Chinese had begun fighting each other. Adviser Huang’s face now turned even more yellow, and he began to cough, often bringing up blood. He said that was all because of his love of country. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I knew the sorrow of losing someone. Sometimes, when I looked at Uncle’s picture, I felt my eyes turn hot and tears well up. I’d call out, “Dear Uncle!” My insides were burning up.

But he never answered me, except to stare at me blankly with the smile of a rich man. He never made it back to India. He’d told me that after returning to India he would change his will so I would inherit the jewels he kept in a British bank in Calcutta. Tharna had told me more than once that she dreamed about those jewels. But that didn’t pan out, and the original will left everything to the wife of the impoverished British aristocrat.

My wife deeply resented the fact that we hadn’t gone to Chongqing when we could have. It was the heat in the Han area that had kept us from going to see Uncle. One of our Maichi ancestors had set out for Nanking once, and had died of heat stroke on the way. After that, any chieftain who sought an audience with the Han emperor left in the fall and returned in the spring, avoiding the lethal summers there. All right, that’s enough talk about such things. All I want to say is, time began to fly after Uncle’s death. One thing would happen, only to be quickly followed by another. Time speeded up, and events occurred faster and faster, as if they’d never slow down again.