Toilets

THE RED HAN CHINESE defeated the White ones.

The routed White Han Chinese surged into our border town.

At first, they underestimated us, thinking their guns were all they needed to obtain grain and meat. I gave it to them. When they had eaten their fill, they wanted liquor and women, something we had in abundance. But since they had no money, they came to me for silver. That was when they discovered that we had armed ourselves years before, and in the end, they were forced to exchange their guns for silver, which they then used to buy wine and women. In droves they swarmed to the brothel, that place that spread syphilis. They were forever shouting, forever leaving their giant footprints in the snow. With them around, even starving dogs had trouble finding a pristine patch of snow on which to deposit their flowerlike footprints.

Adviser Huang, draped in a fox fur robe, said, “They’re too cold to sleep.”

I agreed. The wind cut through their tents. Adviser Huang sighed so much that I had no choice but to give those people food and liquor when it snowed.

They spent most of their time in the brothel, but none of them suffered from syphilis. Then I heard that they had a special medicine to prevent contamination. I asked one of the army officers to give me some. I was free of the disease, since the madam had always given me a healthy girl, so I divided the medicine into two portions—one for Tharna, who had contracted the disease from Wangpo, and one for Chieftain Maichi, to show that his idiot son didn’t want his own father rotting and stinking in bed.

Deeply moved, Father wrote to say that the estate was lonely in the winter. His letter called out to me, “Come back, my son, and bring us a festive new year with the skills you’ve used to run the border town.”

I asked my servants if they wanted to go back. They said they did, especially the one-handed Sonam Tserang, who missed his mother. I asked Aryi if he missed his old executioner father. He shook his head, but then nodded. “Good,” I said. “I miss the chieftain and his wife too.”

So Dolma and the servants began packing. For me, it was all the same wherever we were. I don’t mean that I was a stranger to loneliness, although I seldom felt lonely. The historian reminded me that they called me an idiot. He said that the advantage of being an idiot was that many things that would hurt a normal person had no effect on me. That made sense.

But now we were going back.

A heavy snow fell on the day of our departure. It was a record snowfall, with thick flakes rushing toward earth like flocks of birds. By noontime, it had caved in the tents of the routed White Chinese soldiers. Tucking their heads between their shoulders and cradling their remaining rifles, they ran straight to our big, warm house. This time they would have fought to the death if I had refused to let them in, since they would surely have frozen outside. I waved off the servants, telling them to put away their guns and let the people come upstairs. Soldiers who were too far gone fell facedown in the snow, as if embarrassed to trouble us. A few of the fallen men were saved; the rest were beyond help.

I told Sangye Dolma to get the survivors something to eat.

At that moment, everyone, me included, realized that we could not leave for the estate. So the soldiers were put up in one half of the house, while we occupied the other. And in the basement was all the silver and treasure we had accumulated over the years. If we left, it would surely fall into the hands of the White Chinese.

Fortunately, there was no strife between us and our uninvited guests. The officers in their beaked caps would stand on the opposite veranda and smile at me, while his soldiers bowed and called me “Master,” just like servants. Meanwhile, I gave them grain, meat, oil, and salt. But they were on their own if they had an itch for the liquor and prostitutes in town.

Everyone on both sides took pains to keep a safe distance.

We smiled and greeted one another across that distance, but never got too close. Distance is necessary for people who don’t know one another but must live together. There was one exception, a place where distance seemed to disappear. The toilets. Since we wore long robes, nothing was revealed in the toilet, but the Han Chinese, who wore short jackets, even on bone-chilling winter days, had to stick out their naked rear ends. And those pale rear ends were a source of ridicule by my troops.

And that is why, to tell you what happened, I must begin with the toilets.

But first, we need to see where they were located.

Adviser Huang once said that our house was shaped like a Chinese character. He tore a page from the historian’s notebook to write it for me. It had the exact same shape as the house. This is what it looked like: IHJ. The open side faced the town. We lived in one leg of the house, while the Han lived in the other. And the bottom part was the toilet.

I’d heard stories contrasting the Tibetans with the Han. One of them told of a pair of thieves, a Tibetan and a Han, who were caught stealing gold. When their stomachs were cut open, the Tibetan’s was half-filled with animal hair, the Han’s with iron shavings. Tibetans eat mostly meat, and since it’s never very clean, they ingest lots of cow and goat hairs. The Hans, on the other hand, eat mainly greens—leaves, roots, and stems—which they stir-fry with a metal spatula in an iron wok; over time their stomachs fill up with iron shavings.

Where stomachs are concerned, I guess it’s a tie. Strictly speaking, that’s less a story than a simple contrast. The same holds true for toilets. Now we all know that the Han consider even the British to be barbarians, let alone the Tibetans. Barbarians, that’s what they usually call us. But we have our sense of superiority too. Take toilets, for instance. My sister, who was in far-off England, said that the British revile the Han primarily because of those Chinese toilets. My Han mother said that if asked to name her favorite things in the land of the chieftains, toilets would come in second, right after silver.

I’d never been to the Han area, so I had no idea what their toilets were like. I can describe only ours, which are attached to windowless walls behind our houses. A story tells of a high-ranking official from the Han imperial court who mistook one of our toilets for a little house that we Buddha-worshiping Tibetans had built for birds, because only birdhouses hang on walls, and also because large flocks of red-beaked crows and pigeons were always flying around towering houses. The story goes on to say that the official returned to the imperial court with nothing but praise for the chieftains. That’s right, Tibetans who live in towering houses hang their toilets in the open air.

We and our guests lived on either leg of that Chinese character, with the toilet sandwiched in between. So it became the one place where the two sides met during that extraordinary winter. The Han soldiers aimed their rear ends at the small wooden house hanging on the wall as unimpeded wintry winds froze their exposed extremities. They could not stop shivering, which my people stubbornly interpreted as a fear of us. I tried to make them understand that the Han people were shivering in the toilet because of the cold wind and a fear of heights.

“It can’t do you any harm if they believe that others are weak,” Adviser Huang said.

So I let my people go on ridiculing the other men in the toilet.

I had a private toilet.

To reach it, I had to walk through a room where a charcoal fire burned bright in a bronze brazier. Fragrant smoke from an incense burner would be curling up into the rafters when I walked in. Two married women, probably middle-aged, were in charge. When I emerged from the toilet, whoever was on duty would ask me to sit by the fire to warm myself as she fumigated me from head to toe with incense smoke.

I told Adviser Huang to invite the ranking officer of the defeated army to share the toilet with me. Soon after the invitation was sent, I ran into him outside the toilet. I first invited him to sit by the brazier while the women lit incense and we waited for the fragrance to fill the room. I didn’t have a thing to say to him, so he broke the ice by asking me to join forces to repel an imminent attack by the Communists. He said that the Communists were the party of the poor and that the chieftains would be finished if they came, not to mention a rich man with guns like myself.

“Let’s join forces against them,” he said earnestly.

His eyes reddened when he spoke of what the Communists did to the wealthy. Getting to his feet, he clasped my shoulder with one hand and shook my hand forcefully with the other.

I believed everything he said.

I knew that the officer was talking about matters of life and death, but I couldn’t hold back any longer. Wrenching free of his hands, I dashed into the toilet. A wind happened to be blowing up from below. When I returned after finishing my business, the women fumigated me, and I saw the officer cover his nose with a silk handkerchief. A look of disgust appeared on his face as if my body stank all the time. Before that, I’d been a rich man like him, but that seemed to change after my visit to the toilet, and I had become a stinking barbarian. Yes, how could an officer discuss important matters in a toilet? I walked out.

“Damn him!” I said to Adviser Huang. “Tell the Han to fight their own battles.”

Adviser Huang sighed long and loud. He’d hoped that I’d become an ally of the White Han Chinese. “I guess that means I’ll have to bid farewell to the young master,” he said.

“Go on, then. You can’t forget you’re a damned Chinese, so follow whomever you want.”

I can’t say that the officer’s reaction to the toilet was the only reason I decided not to be the White Han ally, but it sure was an important one.

Spring finally arrived.

My people told me that the Han soldiers no longer shivered in the toilet, partly because the wind was warmer and partly because their fear of heights was no longer a problem; they’d gotten used to the midair toilet. I met the ranking officer in the toilet one more time after that. I didn’t have anything to say to him, and all he said was, “Spring is here.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Spring is here.”

That was the extent of our conversation.

As soon as spring arrived, the People’s Liberation Army began clearing wide passages with explosives for motor vehicles and artillery for their advance into the chieftains’ territory. Some of the chieftains opted to fight the Communists, while others prepared to surrender. My friend Lha Shopa was one of the latter. I heard that a messenger he sent to negotiate with the Communists returned with a complete PLA uniform for him as well as a piece of paper appointing him as some kind of commander. Chieftain Rongong, on other hand, liquidated the wealth she’d accumulated to buy rifles and artillery pieces, in preparation for a battle with the Communists. All the news that came to me indicated that the woman seemed to be getting younger. Chieftain Wangpo was the most interesting. He said he knew nothing about the Communists or what they’d do to him, but he’d never be on the same side as the Maichi family. In other words, he’d surrender if I resisted the Communists and resist if I surrendered.

The steward and Adviser Huang suggested that I hold one last talk with the White Chinese army. Adviser Huang said, “If you want to fight, then you’ll have to make up your mind to work with them. If not, you can tell them to move on, since the weather has warmed up.”

The steward said, “And you can’t talk in the toilet anymore.”

I laughed. “You’re right about that.”

They laughed with me.

The steward asked Adviser Huang if the stuff that came out of the Han rear ends didn’t stink. Adviser Huang said it did. Then the steward asked him which smelled worse, Han Chinese shit or Tibetan shit. That was a tough question, but instead of getting upset or angry, Adviser Huang treated it as a joke. He laughed, and said, “Why doesn’t the steward ask the young master, since he’s shared the toilet with a Han Chinese.”

We all laughed again.

I was preparing to talk to the Nationalist representative about forming an alliance when something happened that caused everything to go up in smoke. One night I was sitting by the lamp with my tongueless historian. We were quiet, because what we faced now went beyond his knowledge, even though it was my habit to summon him whenever something important occurred. As the burning oil popped and crackled, he seemed first puzzled and then lost. Just then Sonam Tserang came in with a sheepish, yet triumphant look on his face, bringing with him a wind that made the lamp flicker.

“I caught her at last,” he announced proudly.

For some time he had been telling me that I should keep an eye on Tharna.

By then, I had all but put her out of my life, except that she still lived in my house and was fed and clothed by me. Sonam Tserang was convinced that that alone was reason for me to be concerned. That, of course, is how servants view relationships; you give someone something, and somehow that binds you together. The Communists were coming, but he focused all his attention on that one woman.

Sonam Tserang had long felt embarrassed over his failure to kill Chieftain Wangpo. Now he had caught Tharna in the act—he had seen a White Han officer come out of her room. He summoned some servants to disarm the officer of his pistol belt before pushing him downstairs, where Aryi tied the offender to a stake. Sonam Tserang dragged me out of my room, but I couldn’t see what was going on downstairs; I merely heard the cracks of the executioner’s whip and the agonizing screams of the offender. Dogs far and near howled as if crazed.

Tharna had committed adultery—again.

Then the moon rose into the sky, and the sounds of snapping dogs echoed in the moonlight.