Tulku

14

THE TUSSLE OVER the initiation ceremony was nothing like as fierce as Theodore had expected. He told Mrs Jones beforehand, and she pleaded with him with surprising earnestness, then suddenly shrugged and said, ‘Ah, well. You’ll just have to tell old Amchi it’s against your religious principles. I’ll back you up, if you really feel that way.’

The Lama Amchi on the other hand accepted Theodore’s decision almost as though he had been aware of it already.

‘It is not necessary that the Mother of the Tulku understands the ritual,’ he said. ‘It is only necessary that she has faith in it. But tomorrow, when her instruction begins, it will be necessary for you to be present.’

‘All right,’ said Theodore reluctantly.

The Lama Amchi was a teacher very like Father in some ways, patient, systematic, stone-certain of his divine right to teach. At the school in the Settlement Theodore had been neither the best pupil nor the worst. At Dong Pe there was only one pupil, Mrs Jones. Theodore was a piece of classroom equipment – a blackboard, so to speak, on which the Lama Amchi wrote for Mrs Jones to read. Theodore deliberately chose this role, rather than become a second pupil in the class. He tried to learn nothing, to let only the surface of his mind become engaged and then to wipe it clean as soon as Mrs Jones had understood what was written there. The job was both tiring and tedious, and though Theodore was perfectly at home in both languages, after about half an hour his mind would go numb, so that he was unable to find the right words for even the simplest phrase. The Lama seemed able to guess when these moments were coming, and would often tell him to rest just as he felt the blankness coming on him. Then Theodore would rise and bow and go to one of the windows, prop his Bible on the sill and read for a while with his fingers stuffed in his ears to shut out the sound of Mrs Jones practising the throbbing and humming mantras which the Lama was teaching her. Or else he would take a pencil and a sheet of the fibrous Tibetan paper and make one more effort to sketch the majestic bulk of the mountain called the Dome of Purest Light, which composed all the far horizon of the valley. After a while, as if at an unperceived signal, he would fold his paper away or put his Bible into his pocket, turn, bow to the Lama, and become a blackboard again.

But even as a blackboard he learnt something. Certain marks, so to speak, could never be quite rubbed out. For instance, he was startled out of indifference by discovering that the Lama didn’t believe in God. Gods, yes, but all bound like men to the world of illusion, beyond which lay something which wasn’t God, but was what the Lama called enlightenment, the only not-illusion. All life yearned towards that state. Souls were like fish struggling towards their spawning-ground against the rush of a great river; they were born again in many forms on that almost endless journey, until they reached their goal. But some, reaching it, turned back to help the others. The Buddha himself was not God, or even a god, but a soul who had chosen to be re-born into the world of illusion when it could have escaped, in order to show others the way. The Siddha Asara was another such teacher.

Theodore paid attention to what the Lama said about the Siddha Asara, because he thought it might affect their escape, but he could make no sense of it. The child in Mrs Jones’s womb both was and was not the Siddha Asara, just as in his previous life he had been Tojing Rimpoche, who was himself and not the Siddha, and yet he was the Siddha . . . Theodore gave up, but the mark was there on the blackboard.

At other times a mark would come and remain indelible in spite of him. The Lama, explaining what he meant by saying that Mrs Jones had not needed to understand her initiation ceremony, but only to have faith in it, had told the following story: some three hundred years before, the fifth Dalai Lama had noticed the goddess Tara walking every day along the pilgrims’ path round his palace. He made enquiries and found that one old man among the pilgrims made that journey every day, repeating the mantra of the goddess as he went. Only the old man got the mantra wrong each time, so the Dalai had him taught the correct words. Immediately the goddess ceased to walk the pilgrims’ way, and did not re-appear until the old man was allowed to say her mantra in his old, meaningless way. Theodore hated this story but couldn’t forget it. It embodied so much he disliked and distrusted about the Lama’s religion – the empty repetition of syllables, like the automatic rotation of prayer-wheels, as if nonsense was more holy, more worthwhile, than honest, wholesome intelligence striving for the meanings of things . . . and yet at the same time Theodore himself acknowledged a presence that listened morning and evening to his attempts to pray but gave no other sign. Were his prayers, like the old man’s mantra, nonsense too?

What did Mrs Jones make of all this? Theodore never asked – as soon as he was out of the Lama Amchi’s room he tried to forget everything to do with it, and Mrs Jones, quick as usual to perceive his needs, normally spoke about other things. But occasionally she would forget, and almost as if talking to herself, would make some comment. One day, for instance, as they were walking – or rather processing, for she was never allowed to move anywhere within the monastery without her own ritual escort – across the main courtyard she said, ‘Funny, that, about my spinal column.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just it comes in a lot. Don’t you remember, him telling me to form the shape of it in my mind, and then dream up a lotus growing out of the top of my skull? That’s not the botanical flower what you and I know, Nymphaea lotus, what I always have a bit of trouble getting out of my mind – it’s his holy lotus, of course. You remember that?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, I won’t bother you with it . . . only I keep thinking, some of what he tells me, I ought to of worked out for myself long ago. Spines, for instance – I’ve always had a fancy for backbones.’

She gave a silent chuckle, reached out and ran her hand from the small of Theodore’s back up to his collar; it was the sort of half-thinking caress one might give to a dog that settles alongside one’s chair, but it made him shiver as though energies were flowing from her finger-tips into his marrow. They walked on, four monks before and two behind, but he had to restrain himself from shaking himself as a dog does after such a touch.

That must have happened quite early in the course of her teaching, because she was still wearing her hat and veil, and all her make-up, and was carrying a frilly parasol over her shoulder. But as week added itself to week and then month to month, she changed. There was no particular day on which she discarded her hat – instead she spent a couple of evenings remodeling one, twisting and steaming and punching and stitching the tolerant felt until, though it was the same hat in all essentials, it now had a curious upward-pointing peak vaguely like the caps worn by Tibetan nuns when they came from the nunnery, two miles along the mountain, to attend one of the ceremonies.

A few days later the veil vanished. Mrs Jones also took to wearing her dark russet riding-cloak, experimenting with its clasp, taking up its hem, devising a loose belt, until she had a garment that fell in much the same folds as a monk’s robe. She gave the parasol to a peasant woman who admired it. And by unnoticed stages she abandoned her make-up. This change was so slow that there was no certain morning on which Theodore realized that her skin was rather coarse – not pocked, but large-pored – with a delta of wrinkles at the corner of each eye, and that a line of dark down ran along her upper lip. The blue-black shadows faded from round her eyes, making them seem less enormous, but they were still the same eyes, large, sparkling with life and full of secrets. She might spend half an evening in her screened nook in the guest-house, quietly humming her mantras or sitting in total silence, cross-legged on her cot, staring at one of the patterns of Tibetan letters which she had hung there; but then she would emerge and begin to tease Lung and Theodore, or touch up her plant-drawings or look at Theodore’s latest work and show him how the emphasis of a line or the deepening of a shadow might give a picture body. They would eat supper, and then she would sit beside Lung on his cot with her head on his shoulder and his hand clasped in her lap and sing his favourite song . . .

The boy I love sits up in the gallery,

The boy I love is looking down at me . . .

and Lung would smile and fondle a tress of hair with his free hand and pretend to be happy, but often the tears would stream down his cheeks as she sang. Theodore was neither shocked nor embarrassed by these scenes. It was like watching an old couple, grandparents of many children, sitting by the hearth and remembering their courting days.

Lung, of course, noticed and resented each alteration in Mrs Jones. Sometimes he argued, but more often he would try and do things to draw her attention back to earlier days: fuss over her plant collection, or try to get her to organize her sketches; strip down her rifle and clean it; unpack and repack the baggage, on the pretext that everything had to be ready for the escape; and so on. One morning Theodore and Mrs Jones returned from the Lama’s house to find that Lung had hammered nails into the wall and hung there, like a military trophy, the sword he had taken from the dead bandit. The rifle was slung across it.

‘That looks real handsome,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Mind you, you’ll have to keep cleaning it, or it’ll get the rust. It’d be better off in its case, honest.’

‘Will not be there long time,’ said Lung.

‘Oho! What’s up, then? You on to something?’

‘I find friend who help us escape.’

‘Have you now? Sure? Who is he?’

‘You see him long time back, drink tea with me. Lama Sumpa his name.’

‘Ah, that fellow! What’s in it for him?’

‘Not say, but perhaps he think if help Chinese, then Chinese make Sumpa Abbot of Dong Pe.’

‘Now you be careful, my love. He’d help the Chinese just as much by pushing me into the first ravine we come to.’

‘No, no,’ said Lung, smiling confidently. ‘Sumpa say perhaps Lama Amchi find wrong Tulku, but Sumpa not sure. If this maybe true Tulku, Sumpa afraid to kill Missy, see. But take Missy far from Dong Pe, then baby is born. If he is true Tulku, Sumpa says, he find way back to Dong Pe.’

‘Now, that’s amazing!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Just what I been thinking myself. I’ll know, won’t I? He’ll tell me, somehow, if he’s . . . what the oracle said he is, and then I can bring him back.’

‘So you are coming,’ whispered Theodore.

‘What do you mean, ducky?’

‘I’ve been scared to ask, and so’s Lung, I guess. You’ve been taking Buddhism so seriously. I mean, your clothes, even.’

She laughed, and her fingers flicked dismissively at her habit.

‘You’re forgetting I’m an actress,’ she said. ‘I like to get myself into a part and play it proper. Not that I ain’t serious about what old Amchi’s been telling me – fact, it makes more sense to me than anything I’ve heard from all the other holy bodies what have tried to make a decent Christian of me. But look at it another way – I’ve got to take it serious, haven’t I? Old Amchi would spot at once if I didn’t.’

‘But you’re coming, all the same?’ insisted Theodore.

‘Course I am. I told you as I nearly died having my other kid. I’m not risking that again, any more than I can help. I’m getting myself to where there are proper doctors, whatever old Amchi says.’

‘Good,’ said Lung. ‘Now, Sumpa make this plan . . .’

‘No, don’t tell us, love,’ interrupted Mrs Jones, ’or Amchi’ll smell it out. Don’t you think so, Theo?’

Theodore nodded. In the glimmering room at the top of the Lama’s house the odour of conspiracy would have reeked about them like incense.

‘I guess you’re right,’ he said. ‘Only how long have we got to wait?’

‘Five weeks,’ said Lung. ‘Then is big festival. Plenty people come to Dong Pe. Everybody most busy. We go then.’

As those weeks dragged by, Lung and Theodore discussed this conversation many times. Mrs Jones usually managed to turn the subject aside, but when Lung tried to insist on talking about the escape she refused to listen.

‘You know,’ she said once, ‘I’m like an old hank of wool what’s got itself all of a tangle, and now I’m sorting myself out and rolling me up into a proper ball what I can knit with.’

She seemed to find the days of waiting no trouble at all, and Theodore endured them well enough, but they were a trial for Lung. He took to visiting Major Price-Evans with Theodore, helping to clean the temple and arguing, very formally and politely despite his inadequate English, for Confucianism against Buddhism. Theodore paid little attention to these debates, which were not very satisfactory even to Lung, because the Major was such a difficult opponent, tending to agree with everything Lung said and then somehow to incorporate it into his own side of the argument. One morning Lung, exasperated but still needing distraction, offered to mend the little windmill which was supposed to drive the second line of prayer-wheels. The Major was delighted, and Lung set about the job with his usual self-mocking competence, borrowing tools from somewhere and then – as if to spin the project out through the weeks of waiting – cutting every strut and joint as if he were making fine furniture.

So, slowly, the moment for escape neared, with increasing tension, like the felt approach of thunder. The monastery began to pulse with a sense of quickened life as the time of the great Festival came nearer. To Theodore’s relief the Lama Amchi announced a holiday from the lesson-periods, as it was his duty to meditate for three days before the start of the Festival, and first he wanted Mrs Jones to take part in the next ceremony of her initiation. He paused when he had made this announcement, and after Theodore had finished translating continued to stare at her with his misty but luminous gaze. She nodded.

‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘If that’s the form, I’ll do a bit of meditating too. Ask if he can find me a cell or something, where I’ll be alone.’

‘The cell is already waiting,’ said the Lama. ‘Tomorrow morning we will hold the ceremony, and then the Mother of the Tulka can retire to her cell. For six days after that we will meet here each morning, so that I may teach her the exercises to follow when she is alone, and then we will both withdraw into silence.’

For a moment Theodore was horrified. This seemed to end all hope of escape. Then the thought struck him that perhaps Mrs Jones knew what she was doing – if she was supposed to be shut in her cell, and in fact they started their escape on the first night, then with luck it would be three days before she was missed. If that was in her mind, she gave no sign, but when Theodore looked at the Lama he found the old man watching him with an intent, half-amused stare, as though he had read every detail of his thought.

Next morning Theodore came out of the temple of the oracle with the tang of the Major’s greasy tea on his lips, and heard the tinkling bells on his right echoed by a new set on his left. He looked and saw that the line of prayer-wheels that had been motionless were twirling like the others. He wondered whether it made any difference that Lung, who had brought them back into meaningless motion, didn’t believe in them at all. Presumably not. His function was like the wind’s function – it didn’t believe in them either. Still, Theodore was glad for Lung’s sake that his work had been successful so he went back into the temple and climbed through the series of rooms at the back to the roof. The rooms were tiny, and empty except for the one on the ground floor. They were connected to each other by ladders like the one he used to clean the Buddha and the taller statues. He found Lung out on the roof, making final adjustments.

‘Well done,’ he said in English. ‘You’ve got them turning faster than the other lot now.’

‘Perhaps I mend that also,’ said Lung. ‘Happy you come, Theo, for you help me. This rope not good, fall off in strong wind, and my arms not long to hold two end.’

His readiness to talk English showed he was in a cheerful mood, but he slipped into Mandarin to give more detailed instructions. Theodore held, pulled and twisted as he was told, but when they set the windmill going again it turned out that this latest adjustment had unbalanced other elements, so that it now quivered alarmingly at each revolution.

‘The thing is full of demons,’ said Lung with a laugh. ‘No wonder in this place. Now how shall I exorcise them?’

He slipped a cord from a pulley and stopped the juddering, then paced around the mechanism, fingering struts and ropes. In the silence a bell clanked and was answered by another, sounds that made Theodore aware of a noise that he had heard for some time without noticing, the deep drone of temple music, joined now by the fluting and tinkling of lighter instruments. He moved to the parapet and looked over the edge.

The doors of the main temple opposite were open, but the mountain brightness was too strong for him to see anywhere into the dark, square hole from which the music came. Now he could distinguish the deep gargling chant of the choir-leader and the boom of response from the choir. He thought he could see the blue shimmer of incense streaming below the lintel and up into the glistening air. The courtyard itself was empty.

He was about to turn back to the trap-door when two monks, wearing the ceremonial gold cockscomb helmets, emerged from under the right-hand arch, followed by Mrs Jones and then four monks. It was a tribute to the vigour of her personality that he knew her at once, because she was wearing the full costume of a Tibetan nun, the heavy, belted robe and the ungainly pointed cap, even the yellow boots. Theodore must have gasped or made some movement that showed his surprise for in a second Lung was at his side, silent at first, then speaking in a voice that was like a groan of anguish.

‘She is shameless! Look how she walks, and yet she is but five months pregnant! It is my child, my child!’

He made a movement, as though to rush down into the courtyard and confront her, but then turned back to the parapet and stood quivering, whispering to himself or groaning aloud, while Mrs Jones, escorted by her small procession, crossed the courtyard. At the temple door she knelt with all her usual grace and touched her forehead on the paving, then rose and was swallowed by the dark square. Lung was in the middle of a long, relaxing sigh when he stiffened again and pointed at the mountainside. The Lama Amchi, unescorted and wearing his plain russet robe, was coming down the stairs from his house.

‘He is a sorcerer,’ said Lung. ‘Look, he is flying!’

Of course it wasn’t true, but even to Theodore’s eyes it seemed that the Lama was coming down the zigzag flights in a series of slow swoops with only the hem of his robe touching the steps. Once he was on level ground they could see his feet pacing beneath the robe, but still that sense of supernatural gliding remained.

‘He is a sorcerer,’ repeated Lung. ‘He is stealing her soul!’

‘No-one can do that,’ said Theodore. Not against her will, he added to himself.

They watched while the Lama performed the same ritual of prostration at the temple door and, welcomed by bells, floated into the dark. Lung groaned again.

‘She is not coming,’ he said.

‘She promised she would.’

‘Then why all this?’

‘She’s acting.’

‘She believes.’

‘What did she tell you last night? I woke up once, and you were still talking.’

‘She said she will come with us, but only because she is frightened about the birth of the child. If it were not for that she would stay.’

‘Well, that sounds certain enough, doesn’t it? And she hasn’t much time to change her mind.’

‘Six days,’ said Lung.