Two stories that turn into one story.

I had a friend in Belgrade, a very intelligent guy who went to the film academy with my brother. His name was Lazar Stojanovic. And for his thesis work, Lazar made an amazing avant-garde film called Plastic Jesus. The plot is indescribable, but basically it was an allegory about Tito. Tito was the Plastic Jesus, and he was played by the filmmaker (and later performance artist) Tomislav Gotovac.

The movie was hilarious, and deeply satirical about Tito and the decline of the Yugoslav political system. There was one long scene in which the leader debated with his commanders about whether it is better to go into battle shaved or unshaven. Finally they decided it was best to be unshaven during the battles but that after winning, they should be clean-shaven.

The head of Lazar’s thesis committee gave the film the highest possible grade. But then, in a government crackdown, the committee head was questioned by the secret police and fired by the academy, and Stojanovic was sentenced to four years in prison for his anti-Tito film.

Now we go to deepest Bosnia, where among poverty-stricken villages on the edge of deep forest there was a game warden who everyone hated. This warden was very strict—if villagers shot a few rabbits out of season, he would write down all their names and turn them in to the police.

So the peasants decided to get revenge. They happened to know that almost every day, the game warden went to a forest clearing, whistled a signal that brought a young female bear out from the trees, then fucked the young bear.

The villagers told the police what was going on, and the police and the villagers hid in the bushes and watched while the game warden walked into the clearing and whistled. Very soon, the bear came into the meadow, and the game warden did it again. The police then arrested the warden. Why? Not on moral grounds, but because bears were protected wildlife under national laws. The game warden went to prison.

Now back to my friend Stojanovic. After four years in prison, he finally got out and we threw him a big party. Lots of food, lots of drinking and laughter. Four years for making a movie? We still couldn’t believe it. Somebody asked Lazar, “What was the worst part about prison?” And he said, “As an intellectual, the worst thing in the prison for me was having to share a cell with the game warden who fucked the bear.”

Before the lamas returned to Tibet, they told us they wanted to make puja, a big ceremony for removing obstacles and ensuring a long life. The ceremony was to start at five in the morning, with prayers and bells and chanting, and offerings of food and fruit and flowers, and the monks wanted all the organizers of the Holland Festival to be present, along with Ulay and me. The puja was to take place in our house, so we had to wake up anyway, but then it turned out that the other five people, for different reasons, didn’t come. One couldn’t wake up, one was feeling sick, another one forgot—various things. So with just Ulay and me, the monks made this entire puja, ensuring long life, and redeeming the negative energy of Positive Zero. Then they went home.

Positive Zero had taken so much out of us, and turned out so terribly, that we were exhausted: we decided to go on holiday.

Do you remember Edmondo, the performance artist from our spice loft, who had been madly in love with the depressed Swedish teenager who never spoke? After he forced her to talk, she moved back to Sweden, and he was distraught—but then she wrote him a letter and said that the whole problem had been Amsterdam. She just hated living in the city. If he lived in the country, she said, she would come back to him.

It turned out that Edmondo’s grandfather, the pyromaniac, owned a farmhouse in Tuscany. So Edmondo told his grandfather, “I don’t want to wait until you die—can you give me this little house, and the farm, so I can bring my girl there and we can live together happily?” So his grandfather gave him the house. The Swedish girl came back, and they went to Tuscany to live happily ever after—except that after three months, she fell in love with the shepherd next door and got pregnant by him and left Edmondo, who was now distraught once more and desperate for company. Could we—Ulay and I, Michael Laub, Marinka, and a new friend, an artists’ agent we had just started working with, Michael Klein—come and visit him?

A free vacation in Tuscany sounded perfect. So we drove down there, only to find that Edmondo’s farmhouse was an utter ruin, with only half a roof and rats running around everywhere. There was no way we could sleep there, we realized. So we went to the village nearby to buy a tent so we could sleep on Edmondo’s property.

The Tuscan landscape was beautiful, but Edmondo’s farm was totally out of whack. There was a rat embryo in the olive oil. He had chickens with epilepsy—every time you fed them, they would fall over. He had a pig called Rodolfina who had a hernia, and a donkey who had fallen in love with the pig: the donkey kind of didn’t know he was a donkey, and he slept with Rodolfina. The only successful part about this farm was Edmondo’s marijuana crop, which he watered regularly—he was always walking around with a joint in his mouth.

So we pitched our tent and stayed there, and it was a lovely holiday. We had been there about a week when Ulay went to the village one morning to phone de Appel in Amsterdam, to find out whether any performance offers had landed in our shoebox. When he came back, his face was drained of all color—he could hardly talk. I said, “What happened?”

It turned out that all five people who had been instrumental in the Holland Festival—all five people who’d missed the puja ceremony that morning—had died in a plane crash in Switzerland. Wies Smals had been one of them, along with her six-month-old son. They had gone to Geneva to see an installation by Daniel Buren, the French conceptual artist, and were on their way back to Amsterdam. It was a small jet: the pilot didn’t have much experience flying it, and they hit a sudden downdraft over the Alps and went into a mountain.

It was unthinkable, really—an absolute nightmare. We packed everything and drove straight back to Amsterdam, a ten-hour drive.

When we arrived, it turned out the bodies were still in Switzerland. I remember walking into the gallery, and everything was just as it had been: our shoebox, Wies’s glasses, three apples sitting on the table….Little tiny things, but the kind of things that mean so much. I remember thinking how very much these small things mattered.

While everyone was standing around in confusion, I went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with hot water. Then I got a couple of rags, and I started washing the gallery floor. At this moment I needed to do something real—something very simple.

Then the most incredible thing happened. The bodies were brought back, a funeral had to be organized. And during this time, a letter arrived from the monks who had appeared in Positive Zero. The envelope was postmarked the day before the plane crash. And the letter said, “We are so sorry for your loss.”

Credit 7.1

Wies Smals at the Royal Palace, Amsterdam, 1979

I had believed that happiness could protect you. I had thought it was like an invisible shield that guarded you from all misfortune. Wies had been so joyous about having her baby—she was in love. Surely nothing could ever harm them. Their deaths brought an end to that belief.

From one crack in the earth to another.

At first, like almost everybody else, we’d thought that the Chinese had built the Great Wall to protect themselves from Genghis Khan and the Mongol tribes. But as we did more reading, we found that this wasn’t true. What we discovered was that the Wall had been designed in the form of a gigantic dragon, as a mirror image of the Milky Way. The ancient Chinese had started the Wall by sinking twenty-five ships at the edge of the Yellow Sea in order to create the foundation for the dragon’s head. Then, after the dragon rose from the sea, its body twisted across the landscape and through the mountains, corresponding exactly to the shape of the Milky Way, until it reached the Gobi Desert, where the tail was buried.

Now we made a formal proposal, once again to the Museum Fodor curators who’d helped us get the government funding for Nightsea Crossing Conjunction.

We wrote:

That edifice which best expresses the notion of the Earth as a living being is the Great Wall of China. In the case of the Great Wall it is a mythical dragon who lives under this long fortress like structure….The dragon’s color is green, and the dragon represents the unification of two natural elements, earth and air. Though it lives underground, it symbolizes the vital energy on the surface of the earth. The Great Wall marks the dragon’s movement through the earth, and so embodies the same “vital energy.” In modern scientific terms the Wall lies on what are called geodetic force lines, or ley lines. It is a direct link to the forces of the earth.

Our plan was for me to start the walk at the Wall’s eastern, female end, the Gulf of Bohai on the Yellow Sea, and for Ulay to start at the Wall’s western, male end, the Jiayu Pass in the Gobi Desert. After walking a total of 2,500 kilometers each, we would meet in the middle.

About our original plan, to marry when we met there, we now spoke less and less.

The truth is that my relationship with Ulay was falling apart. Since the death of his mother—specifically since I had refused, on the night of the funeral, to conceive a child—we had been furious at each other, but saying little to nothing about it.

Actually, our transition from frequent and ardent lovers to a couple living in mere physical parallel had begun with Nightsea Crossing. The performance required abstinence and distance during our off hours. And Ulay wanted so badly to do the piece all the way through, but he kept having to stop, which was killing him—and which distanced us still further. And we were still performing the piece here and there, trying to reach our goal of doing it ninety times.

He was taking his humiliation out on me. He would flirt with waitresses, airline stewardesses, gallery assistants—anybody—right in front of me. I feel certain, in retrospect, that he was having affairs.

That summer we went to Sicily to make another video piece, one inspired in a way by City of Angels. In the new piece, as in City of Angels, we would not appear. We had spent time there before, and the division between the sexes fascinated us: the women were always indoors, dressed in black and sitting in clusters as they talked together; the men were always outside, talking in their own groups. We wanted to base our film on these phenomena.

We were in Trapani, which is in the middle of nowhere. When we first got there, we wrote a newspaper advertisement saying that we were looking for women from age seventy to a hundred to appear in our film, and also any virgins from eighty to ninety years old. We would pay them for their time, we said. The ad went in the paper. And then we sat in our hotel for three days, and no one came. Absolutely nobody. Then, on the fourth day, a very proper older lady arrived, dressed like an elegant widow. She had a friend with her, similarly dressed, but the first lady did all the talking. She said, “What do you want? Tell us the story.”

So we told them, in all our enthusiasm, about the film we had in mind. We were drinking coffee together, in small Italian cups. The woman looked at me. Then she said, “We’re going to help you; we’re going to talk to our brother.” And on the next day, the entire town mobilized to help us. We were given an old mansion to film in, as well as full permission to film anywhere outdoors. Young men materialized to help carry the equipment, and even more important, our equipment was safe. There in Sicily, where everything was controlled by the Mafia, I felt like your belongings could vanish in three seconds if you didn’t watch them like a hawk. Now we could leave our cameras in our unlocked car and nothing would be touched—the Mafia protected us. I think they just liked us, because we were so insanely strange: they were entertained by us. We even found two virgins, eighty-six-year-old twin sisters. They blushed very sweetly when their moment on camera came.

We called the film Terra degli Dea Madre—roughly translated, “Land of the Matriarchs.” In it, the camera’s point of view floats eerily from a dining room full of old ladies chatting together (the soundtrack is me speaking in tongues) out to a cemetery, where a group of men in black suits and white shirts stand talking in their rough voices. To create this floating effect, we used a Steadicam. Ulay, the camera enthusiast, was fascinated by this device and wanted to try it out. It was a big, heavy apparatus—you had to strap yourself into it, and almost as soon as he was wearing it, he felt something in his back crack. No pain, but a definite crack.

That night, after we had dinner at a local restaurant, we went for ice cream in the village square. The waiter put the bill on the table, and just as Ulay reached for it, a sudden gust of wind blew the paper up in the air. He playfully grabbed for it—then fell to the ground in agony. His back had turned into a mass of muscle spasms.

He looked so scared: he was in overwhelming pain. And the local hospital was no help at all—if you went to the bathroom, another patient would come and take your bed from you: families were literally sitting on patients’ beds to hold them. After a couple of bad nights there, we flew back to Holland and checked Ulay into a decent hospital. He was diagnosed with a herniated disc, and the doctor wanted to operate immediately. Ulay refused to have the operation.

He was afraid to have his back operated on, but I believe he was afraid of many things at that point—afraid and angry and confused. We found an Ayurvedic doctor, Thomas, who began giving him alternative treatments, a combination of acupressure and the application of medicinal oils, and his condition improved. But our relationship continued to decline, even more rapidly than before.

Since his back was in a delicate state, our sex life stopped altogether. For almost a year, I was reduced to being his nurse, and nothing I did for him was ever good enough. If I brought him food, it was always too cold or too salty, or too something else. If I offered him sympathy, he was distant and rejecting. I was hurt and angry, but there was more: I was now in my late thirties, and feeling fat and frumpy and bad about myself in general.

The following spring, we got an invitation to teach a two-month summer course at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was a very well-paid position, and by now Ulay was feeling much better, but he didn’t want to go. He said, “I think we need time off; you go and I’ll stay.” So I went, and he stayed.

The first thing I did when I got to San Francisco was to announce a five-day fast for the students in my performance-art workshop, an exercise for improving willpower and concentration. As always, I participated.

The second thing I did was to have a mad affair.

This was the first time I’d ever been unfaithful to Ulay. And this had been building up in me for a long time. He hadn’t exactly been making me feel wanted or desirable. And there was a simple biological fact: I might’ve been getting close to forty, but I was still a young woman. While Ulay recuperated, he claimed to have become interested in certain tantric practices that would unleash his kundalini life force. Abstinence, he said, was part of the program.

This was not my program.

Robin Winters, a painter I’d met years before in Amsterdam, was also teaching a summer course at the Institute. And one night after a lecture we found ourselves alone together, and we started kissing, and that was that. For the next week we did little else but have sex. It was great, but then I started to feel terribly guilty, and I just stopped. Then it was time for me to go home.

I’d been gone for two months, the longest Ulay and I had ever been apart. In those days there was no e-mail, of course, and overseas phone calls were ridiculously expensive. We’d corresponded, but only a tiny bit. In his letters he didn’t say much more than that he was doing fine. And my guilt kept boring its way into me.

Ulay was waiting for me at the airport in Amsterdam. He looked thinner than ever, and I could tell just by looking at him that he was still in some physical pain. This only increased my guilt. On the drive home, we chatted about this and that, but the pressure was building up inside me, and then it just blew: I burst into tears and told him everything. It had only been one week, I said; it meant nothing. I was really, really sorry.

His response amazed me. He was calm; he was sympathetic. “I understand,” he said. “Don’t worry; everything is fine.” Wow. Maybe the tantric discipline really has worked wonders for him, I thought. This is the greatest man I’ve ever known. How inconceivable, how beautiful, that he really understands.

I’d landed in the morning. It had been a very long flight from San Francisco to Holland, and I fell asleep as soon as I got home. I finally woke up at about six P.M., and Ulay wasn’t around, so I went to the square with a couple of friends to have coffee. I told them about everything that had happened—the affair, my confession, Ulay’s amazing reaction. They looked at each other. Then they told me: three days after I’d left for San Francisco, Ulay had taken up with a girl from Surinam, and he’d lived with her in our home literally until the morning I returned.

I went back home, and when Ulay returned, I asked him if it was true. He said he had gone to some opening where he met this Surinam girl, and then they went to eat something, and they both got some kind of food poisoning from the fish they ate. So they went to the hospital to get their stomachs pumped, and then he invited her home and she stayed.

He was actually trying to enlist my sympathy!

Instead I went totally nuts. I smashed everything in the house, and when I ran out of things to smash, I re-smashed what I’d already smashed. It would’ve been one thing if he’d confessed to me when I confessed to him. But to leave it all on me and pretend he was above it all…the arrogance (or cowardice) of it was breathtaking. After smashing a final dish, I walked out and went to stay with friends. After a day, I came home to pack, and then I moved out for good. And then I went to India.

He came to India after me, and we started again. All my friends told me it was a terrible idea. I should have listened.

The Museum Fodor curators agreed to help us with our Great Wall walk. Together with them we created a foundation, called Amphis, to move the project forward. We contacted the Chinese embassy in The Hague to ask their advice. An official there told us, off the record, that the Chinese government would be more receptive to a film about walking the Wall than a performance piece celebrating the first people ever to do it. And one more thing: They didn’t want us to be the first people to do it. One man at the embassy quoted Confucius: “It is impossible to walk a road that has never been walked before.”

A long dance began.

The embassy put us in touch with an important group in Beijing, the China Association for the Advancement of International Friendship—the CAAIF. In reality, of course, they were just an arm of the Chinese government. We wrote to them about our project—this time mentioning that we wanted to make a film—and they wrote back very politely, but agreeing to nothing. They also added that though our proposed film sounded interesting, the idea of foreigners walking the Wall before a Chinese ever accomplished the feat seemed to demand further consideration.

Over the next couple of years we continued to write to the Chinese, and we continued to receive vague and polite replies about international friendship. After a while, we went to consult with a friend who was doing some business in China. We said, “Excuse me, what are we doing wrong? We can’t move forward with this project.” We showed him some of the letters. He looked at me and started laughing. “What’s so funny?” we asked.

“You know,” he said, “in the Chinese language there are seventeen ways to say no, and in this correspondence they’ve used all seventeen ways.”

“What should we do?”

“You have to go through the Dutch minister of culture,” he said. The government had a huge cultural foundation, he reminded me. Why hadn’t we thought of this in the first place? So we sent the foundation our proposal and got an immediate response. A very interesting project, the government said. They wanted to talk to us. We were very excited.

The background of all this was that just at this moment, the Dutch government and the electronics company Philips were building a big factory in China—but at the same time, the Dutch government had signed a contract to build a submarine in Taiwan. Because of that contract, the Chinese ambassador had left the country in protest, and China had cut all ties with the Netherlands.

Strangely enough, the Dutch government saw our project as a way to restore relations with China. They canceled the submarine contract with Taiwan, and they proposed to China this wonderful friendship walk on the Great Wall. And the Chinese got interested, too, because they wanted the Philips factory. A long series of negotiations began.

Finally the Chinese said they would sign on to our project, but they wanted one million Dutch guilder—about $300,000—for security, accommodations, food, and guides. And this turned out to be just fine with the Dutch government: the price of restoring good relations with China. We were in the middle of the whole thing.

Then we were told we had to postpone our project for another year. We had no idea why.

And then, miraculously, a Chinese man walked the Wall.

In 1984, a remarkably short time after the Chinese government agreed to our proposal, a railway clerk from western China named Liu Yutian set out on a solo walk across the Great Wall. The official Chinese news release said that in 1982, Liu had “read an article in a newspaper that some foreign explorers were planning to explore the whole length of the Great Wall….He was not happy after hearing that news. In his mind, the Great Wall belongs to the Chinese nation, and if someone was going to explore it, it should be a Chinese.”

An interesting story. And fascinating timing.

A year later, we were invited to China for the first time—not to begin our project, but to meet the heroic Liu Yutian, the first man ever to walk the Great Wall, and to discuss our walk further. There was a big ceremony to celebrate our meeting with Liu; many photographs were taken. All the publicity made clear the fact that the Chinese man had gone first and Ulay and I would be second.

Beijing scared me. We felt under constant surveillance. There were hardly any cars, just thousands of bicycles—only government officials had cars. We were housed in a concrete apartment block with no toilets: you had to go to the public toilet at the end of the street. But it was indoor plumbing—and we understood that this was luxury. It was all too reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc drabness of Belgrade, but so much worse: this was Communism combined with fanaticism. We sat through meeting after meeting, and I never had any idea what was really going on or if any progress was being made. And in this chilling atmosphere, Ulay and I were growing more and more distant from each other.

Ulay with the first Chinese man to walk the Wall, 1988

Because of his long association with Polaroid, Ulay had access to the company’s giant, room-size camera in Boston. This camera took tremendous, literally life-size (80 by 88-inch) pictures. We made several series of these big Polaroids. One group, from Modus Vivendi, showed Ulay and me each posed as a hunched, weary figure carrying a box. His box was empty, mine was full. The images had a grave, timeless quality.

Our friend the artist’s agent Michael Klein began to sell these giant pictures—to museums, banks, corporations—and for the first time in our relationship, we weren’t dirt poor. As always, I paid no attention to the money: Ulay took care of all that.

Marina Abramović/Ulay, Modus Vivendi, Polaroids, 1985

In the spring of 1986 we had a show of some of the giant Polaroids, also called “Modus Vivendi,” at the Burnett Miller Gallery in Los Angeles. On the night of the opening there was a big crowd. Ulay hung around for a little bit, but then he said to me, “Oh, you know how to deal with people; I’m just going to have a walk.” And he left.

He was gone for a couple of hours. It occurred to me once or twice during the opening that he was on quite a long walk….Did I know, on some level, what was actually going on? Did I suspect? There I was, smiling and making small talk with people I had no interest in talking to, doing our business, while he was off somewhere screwing the gallery secretary, a pretty young Asian woman. Friends told me about it later. I wish they’d never told me.

This is when the failure of my working relationship with Ulay began.

For the last three years we were together, I was hiding, even from our closest friends, the fact that our relationship had fallen apart. I was hiding it from everybody, because I could not stand the idea of this failure. (And I was terrified—I kept thinking, This is the moment you get cancer, when the emotions you’re hiding make you sick.) I had given up working on my own for an ideal that I thought was higher: making art together and creating this third element we called that self—an energy not poisoned by ego, a melding of male and female that to me was the highest work of art. I could not stand the idea that it actually didn’t work.

And that we failed for the stupidest, pettiest reason—the failure of our domestic life—was the saddest thing of all. For me private life was part of the work, too. For me our collaboration was always about sacrificing everything for the bigger cause, the bigger idea. But in the end we failed because of smallness….

We did the final performance of Nightsea Crossing, day ninety, in October 1986 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Ulay wore black, I wore white. To commemorate the completion, the museum also held an exhibition of artifacts documenting our previous five years of work: there were photographs of the robes of various colors we’d worn for each of the performances; there were segments of the big round table we’d used for Nightsea Crossing Conjunction. The museum acquired for its collection the entire installation of Nightsea Crossing, as well as the Citroën van in which we lived for so long while crisscrossing Europe to perform our work.

Not long afterward, for the Kunstmuseum Bern, we did a piece called Die Mond, Der Sonne (“The Moon, The Sun”) that consisted simply of two enormous black vases we’d made, exactly the size of our bodies: one had a slick and shiny surface; the other was matte, completely light-absorbing. The vases represented us and our inability to perform together anymore. And this piece was a clear end to our personal relationship.

Marina Abramović/Ulay, Die Mond, Der Sonne (“The Moon, The Sun”), twin lacquered vases, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, 1987

Maybe I should’ve seen something that happened on my fortieth birthday as an omen. Our friend Tony Korner, the owner of Artforum, threw Ulay and me a party on November 30, complete with a huge cake shaped like the Great Wall—it stretched all the way across a long dinner table, with a little figure of Ulay on one side and one of me on the other side. There were eighty-three candles in all, since he was forty-three and I was forty. And once all these candles were lit, they flared up and created a blaze that melted the cake and almost set the house on fire. How funny: a collapsing cake, to celebrate a collapsing relationship.

In early 1987 Ulay made another trip to China to continue the negotiations for our Wall walk. The Chinese were constantly changing the terms; it was infuriating. But then there was a breakthrough and we were finally given a definite date: the walk would take place that summer. I was to meet him in Thailand to make final plans for the piece.

I have to tell you my state of mind at this point: I felt like a failure. Ulay had cheated on me again and again, both behind my back and in plain sight. And so when I arrived in Bangkok, I was desperate. I was insane with jealousy, dying to know who he was having an affair with now, and determined to play a role: the happy woman who doesn’t care. I was having a mad affair with a French writer, I told him; the sex was fantastic. It was a complete fabrication.

And it served the desired purpose—he instantly told me what he was up to. She was a rich, Waspy American, whose husband, a musician, was in prison in Thailand on a drug charge.

“Great!” I said, still in my role as the happy, liberated woman. “Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?”

This was how low I had sunk. And sexual excitement had nothing to do with my idea.

But Ulay, naturally, was turned on—and surprised and delighted that I had morphed into a different woman. No more mad jealousy, no more scenes with smashing things. He smiled. “I’ll ask her,” he said.

And the next day, smiling again, he brought back her answer: it was fine with her, he said.

That night we went to the house where he was staying with her, a woman straight out of the world of rock and roll, and the two of them got really drunk and did a lot of cocaine. I didn’t touch a thing, but soon, all three of us were naked. I couldn’t have been less turned on. It’s hard to explain the terrible state of mind I was in: I had to see.

I’ll never forget that night for the rest of my life. First Ulay and I had sex, very briefly, and then the two of them fucked in front of me. And it was as if I didn’t exist—even I somehow forgot that I existed.

Later, it was around five in the morning, and I was lying on the bed next to them, wide awake, while they slept, exhausted. I just lay there as the slow luminosity of the new day crept in, and the roosters began to crow outside….And then I heard an old Thai woman in the kitchen, washing the dishes while preparing breakfast. I remember everything: the smell, the stillness, the two of them beside me in this bed….

I had put myself in so much pain that I no longer felt any pain. It was like one of my performances, except that it wasn’t—this was real life. But I didn’t want it to be real. I felt nothing. People always say, when they’re hit by a bus and lose a leg, that they feel no pain: that the nerves simply can’t transport so much pain to the brain. It’s a total overload. Yet I had done it on purpose. I had to do this. I had to put myself in this situation, to give myself this much emotional pain, in order to get rid of it, to exorcise him. And I did it. But the cost was very high.

I felt complete stillness, absolutely nothing. Numb. Then I got up, took a shower, and left. That was the moment I stopped liking his smell. And the moment I stopped liking his smell, it was over.

Later that day, I took a flight back to Amsterdam.

The Chinese had received their fee, and the date was set. Then suddenly they wanted more money. It was like something out of the Mafia. The Chinese government sent us a telegram demanding an additional 250,000 guilder, some $80,000, for “security and soft drinks.” At this point the Dutch government had already paid them a huge amount; there was nothing left in the budget. But there was no alternative—too much time and money had already been invested. The additional funds had to be raised. And our summer start date was postponed.

The thought of spending another winter in Amsterdam with Ulay was unacceptable. I wanted to get as far away as possible, geographically and spiritually, so I decided to go to the Tushita monastery, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to do the Green Tara retreat. I had first learned about Green Tara, the Tibetan goddess who removes obstacles in your life, when I visited Bodh Gaya.

Now I had lots of obstacles. There were the problems with the Chinese; there were all the issues with Ulay. I was feeling miserable. This long retreat, I felt, could help cleanse me for walking the Wall.

The retreat was very strict. In complete isolation, seeing no one, talking to no one, you would repeat a certain mantra, one million, one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven times—all while imagining you were Green Tara. The whole process took about three months. I was eager to begin.

I flew from Amsterdam to Delhi, and took a very long train ride north to Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama, a beautiful little hillside village with a magnificent view of the snowy Himalayas. The Tushita monastery was in the hills above town. I arrived at about three o’clock in the afternoon and went to the information center, where a man told me, “You should stay here tonight and go to the monastery tomorrow morning—a rickshaw can take you then.” I said, “No, no, no, please—I am not interested in staying overnight; I want to go to the monastery immediately. I can walk.” I was single-minded about this. The guy said, “But it gets dark at around five thirty.” And I said, “I was told that it’s only a two-and-a-half-mile walk, maybe forty-five minutes. I’ll be there by four or four thirty.” The guy said, “There are lots of monkeys in the forest; you really shouldn’t walk alone.” I said, “Just tell me which road to take.”

He showed me on a map, and the path looked very simple—just three turns. So with my rucksack on my back, I set out.

There really were monkeys in the forest, little nasty beasts, and they kept jumping at me as I walked: I kept having to shout at them and chase them away. I walked and walked, for over an hour. I was sure I’d taken every turn I was supposed to take—except now it was getting dark, and there was no sign of the monastery; there was no sign of anything. I was in the middle of nowhere, totally lost, with no idea what to do.

Then I saw a little light, far off among the trees.

I walked toward the light, and soon I saw it was coming from a small house in the forest. An old monk was standing in front of the house, washing his rice bowls. I said, “Tushita monastery, Tushita monastery”—and he laughed and laughed. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Tea, tea.” Hospitality is very important there, and there is always tea.

“No, no,” I said. “Time, time, dark. Walk to monastery.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “Come in.” He said nothing about the monastery. I realized I had no choice. It was his house, after all.

I went inside and followed the monk to the living room. And there in the middle of the living room sat the mummified body of Ling Rinpoche, the teacher of the Dalai Lama, the man who had gently flicked my forehead and made me weep uncontrollably in Bodh Gaya five years before. The body had been preserved in salt: it looked eerily alive.

The monk brought my tea, put it down on the table, and left, quietly closing the door behind him.

I had heard he’d died, three years after I met him. I thought that I would never see him again. Now here he was, and I had had to lose myself in the forest to find him.

The same feelings of overwhelming tenderness and love washed over me, once more, like a wave. I prostrated myself in front of him, weeping and weeping. After a while I sat up and drank my tea, just looking at Ling Rinpoche and shaking my head.

I think I stayed for about an hour. Then I went out and the old monk was just sitting there. “Tushita monastery?” I said.

“Tushita monastery is next door,” he said.

And he took me by the hand and led me through the trees to the monastery, which was about a hundred meters away.

The Tushita monks greeted me, and I began. Scattered around the monastery, deep in the forest, were little retreat cells: tiny huts on raised platforms with room for just one sleeping bag and an altar. I was given my own hut, and my instructions.

I was to say the Tara prayer one million, one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven times. Using prayer beads, I was to count each prayer I completed, and there was no relaxing—I was to pray and count for three hours, sleep for three hours, then wake up and pray and count for another three hours, over and over and over and over, all the while trying to imagine that I was Green Tara. I soon found, however, that this was very difficult to do. I couldn’t stop thinking how unhealthy I would look if I were green.

Every morning, there would be a soft knock on the door of the hut, meaning one of the monks had left my food for me. There was no talking with the monks, no communication of any kind—the food would just be left, the monk would leave, and I would open the door and eat. There was just one vegetarian meal a day. Very bland—salt and spices were thought to excite the emotions. And a bottle of water. You were supposed to eat before noon.

I had some bad moments during the three months, some deep depressions. But repeating the mantra again and again and again has a stabilizing effect on the mind and body: your sleeping and awake states become one; dreams flow into reality. And the moment you step into this other state of mind, you are tapping into a limitless energy, a place where you can do anything you want. You’re no longer little you with all your limitations—“poor Marina,” the person who cries like a baby when she cuts herself slicing an onion. When this kind of freedom comes, it’s as if you’re connected with a cosmic consciousness. It’s the same thing, I would soon find, that seems to happen in every good performance: you’re on a larger scale; there are no more limits.

It was a very important lesson to learn.

After three months of counting prayers, I put a message outside my door saying that I had finished. Then the monks came and took me to the monastery, where I was supposed to burn all my possessions, making me newborn. The monks were very practical—you weren’t supposed to burn your money or passport, or else they’d never be able to get rid of you. But you did have to give up anything that was important to you, and what was important to me was my sleeping bag. It was very expensive, very warm; it was like part of my body. I loved it. I burned it. And then I was free.

When the retreat was done I went down to Dharamsala. It was a little village, just three streets, but after I had been there for fifteen minutes I felt like I was in the middle of Times Square and got a huge migraine. I had to flee back to the monastery for ten days to rebalance myself.

Then I decided to take some time off. I took a train to Dal Lake in Kashmir, where you can stay in these wonderful houseboats. It was very pleasant but a little boring. After a few days of floating and smiling, I decided to go to Ladakh to see the dancing lamas.

Every year in Ladakh there are several festivals in which these Buddhist monks, wearing ornate costumes and masks of the gods’ faces, dance and chant all day long for days at a time, to the accompaniment of tremendous, unending drumming. This incessant dancing and chanting requires almost supernatural physical force: the masks and costumes are very heavy. I was fascinated from a performance point of view to know how the lamas prepared for this festival.

Visiting the lama dance festival in Ladakh, India, 1987

The bus trip from Kashmir to Ladakh, through the Himalayas just after the snow melted, was more or less suicidal. The roads were narrow, the cliffs tremendous. Rounding curves, you could see your wheels practically going over the edge. A year earlier, I learned, one convoy of buses had been hit by an avalanche. Five buses dropped straight into the nothingness: everybody died. It turned out that the brother of our driver had been driving one of those buses. When we got to the spot where it happened, our driver stopped, got out, and climbed down the cliff to find his brother’s body—the snow was melting, so it was his chance to see him at last. He just left us in the bus: we had to sleep there that night. The next day another bus came to pick us up, and we finally arrived in Ladakh.

Ladakh is 4,000 meters high—you take three steps and you get dizzy. It takes days just to get used to the altitude. Finally I got acclimated, and hired a guide to take me to the monastery. I arrived, and they had a room for me. I was standing in front of the monastery—the sun was just going down, very early as always in the mountains—when I saw this crazy-looking blond woman in Tibetan clothes, with flowers in her hair and a rucksack on her back, coming down the hill, singing. This seemed pretty interesting! I went over and talked to her.

She was a landscape architect from Chicago who spoke three Tibetan dialects, and she had been appointed by the Dalai Lama to reconstruct the garden of the Buddha in Bodh Gaya at the time of his enlightenment. She said to me, “Oh, don’t sleep in the monastery; sleep with me in the tent—it’s much better.” I was a little worried: once the sun goes down it’s freezing, and I had burned my wonderful, expensive sleeping bag, which kept me warm in any weather, and bought a cheap new one. But I felt I had to say yes, because this woman was kind of amazing.

Night fell; I went to her tent, which she had pitched right in front of the monastery. She was inside, naked, with only a little blanket to cover her. “How can you sleep like that?” I asked. She told me she had learned Tummo meditation from the Tibetans, a very special exercise that took four years to master. By visualizing a fireplace above your solar plexus, it’s possible to raise your body temperature to a point where you feel hot in the middle of the snow. To practice, Tibetan monks sit in the snow, naked, in the lotus position while students put wet towels on their shoulders. Whoever can dry his towels first wins. This woman from Chicago knew that technique. I was impressed.

The monastery had twelve monks, men of all ages, shapes, and sizes. Two were very young and very tall; one was middle-aged, and quite short and fat—really almost square. I spent ten days hanging out with them, eating meals with them, watching them prepare for the festival in the courtyard where the lama dance was to take place.

I liked these lamas very much. We laughed a lot. But I was seriously underwhelmed by their exercises. A little bit of drumming—tap tap tap—and a little dancing, but nothing at all impressive. I began to think I was in the wrong place with the wrong people.

The big day came. Four thousand people arrived, from all over the Himalayas. They seated themselves all around this big courtyard, just before dawn. The drummers were ready to drum, the lamas were ready to dance. Everything starts at the moment the sun comes up. There was total silence. The little fat monk stood in the center of the courtyard in heavy red robes, a big gold mask of a goat on his face. Waiting, waiting for the sun. Silence, mesmerizing. Then the first sliver of sun appeared over the horizon, and the drumming began.

The drums were deafening. The same rhythm, over and over and over, and so loud that your body vibrated. And the little square monk, short and fat and burdened with his heavy mask and costume, jumped straight into the air and did three salto mortales—CHUK-CHUK-CHUK—just like that, landing effortlessly on his feet. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He repeated the same routine every day for ten days.

Later on I asked him how this was possible. I had seen the rehearsals: nothing had prepared me for the real thing.

“But it’s not us doing the jumping,” he said. “The moment you put on the face and dress of the Divine Entity, you are not you anymore. You are Her, and your energy is limitless.”