The White Mirror (5 page)

Again, the translator directed his response toward the flames. “He is praying for the soul of the dead man, according to his own rule. He wants to know what happened.”

Doso rubbed his large hands on his knees. He cast a quick, fond glance at his children. Then he frowned, raised his cup in invitation for them all to drink again, and drank it down.

“The man who died is known to us,” he said. “He was called Dhamo. He lived in seclusion in the temple up the mountain.”

Andruk was the first to speak. “What happened to him?” His glance flickered to where Doso's eldest son, a boy of six or seven, listened wide-eyed.

Doso drank again. “He took his own life.”

“I heard that something was painted on his body,” said Andruk. He looked at Li Du for confirmation. Li Du nodded.

Rinzen's aged face creased in distress. “Paint on the body,” he said, with a shudder. “What horror has visited this place?”

Doso nodded. “There was paint. But he applied it himself—his hand was covered in it. We found leather pouches in the snow—he brought the paint with him.”

The people around the hearth were silent while the flames whispered and crackled. Doso drew a breath and offered the bottle around the circle, poising it over each cup in turn. He filled his own cup to the brim again. “I would not speak of the dead,” he said. “It is known that the subject attracts bad spirits. But I will explain, because most of you are strangers here, that this event is not so impossible to comprehend. Dhamo was a man of peculiar fixations.” Doso paused. He looked at Rinzen, as if seeking affirmation.

Rinzen nodded. “Dhamo saw what most people do not see. He lived in a world a little removed from this one. He was a man of visions, and he possessed the gift of being able to express these visions in his art.”

“His art?” The question came from Hamza.

Doso took another drink. “Dhamo was a painter. He came to our mountain temple thirteen years ago, and we have honored his request for solitude ever since.”

“The white mirror.” Andruk said the words slowly. “Why did he paint the white mirror on his flesh?”

Doso shook his head. “That is not for us to understand. We did not communicate with him, nor he with us. He lived in his studio and painted there alone.”

Rinzen set his cup down on the floor. “It is good that the Chhöshe is here. You are sure that a monk cannot be summoned from the village to assist him?”

Doso was running his thumb along the edge of his cup, his face tense with concentration. “Not until the snow melts. The Chhöshe is at the temple. He will do all he can to protect Dhamo and our family.”

The Chhöshe must be a lama, Li Du thought. He remembered Hamza's description of the young monk he had seen that morning.

Kamala approached silently and added a root to the stew that Li Du did not recognize. She withdrew to the table and began to carve out pieces of preserved ham with a glinting blade. Andruk's eyes followed her, then returned to the fire.

Li Du became aware of a soft buzzing sound in the corner. The old woman was spinning a prayer wheel, its beaded string creating the high droning sound as it revolved around and around. Her listless expression suggested that she did not understand what was being said. Her rheumy eyes were fixed on the hearth, watching a charcoal cave fill with blue flame.

Kamala ladled stew into bowls. In the firelight her soft face glowed. Her braided hair, thickened with yarn, was pinned up and ornamented with an engraved silver disk. When she brought food to the old woman, she took the prayer wheel away gently, and replaced it with the bowl.

“I heard,” said Kamala in a clipped, tense voice, “that his body was not facing our home. That is good.”

The boy standing in the corner widened his eyes. “Mother,” he said, “is Dhamo going to walk through the village tonight? Is he going to—”

Kamala's voice softened instantly as she replied, “Of course he will not. He will travel far away. And you will stay close to me.”

The boy looked unconvinced, but Doso was speaking again. “It is unwise to confuse the night by talking about spirits, and it is not a subject for children. My children,” he said, “Sangyal, Tara, Tenzin, and the little one has my own name.” Doso looked with pride at his family. “My line is a very old one,” he said. “I will tell you how responsibility for this land first came to my ancestor, who was only a poor traveling laborer from south of Tsang with no hope of advancement, and of how he built this house, and of his descendants.”

Doso proceeded to give an account of his family's history while the guests silently ate their dinner. The litany seemed to calm him. He spoke of his ancestor who had impressed a king with a feat of strength, of his great-grandfather who had fought the Mongols in the north, and of his grandfather who had traveled to China and to Lhasa and into the Mughal kingdoms, and had restored the manor to new strength. He spoke modestly of his own travels as a younger man. “My firstborn, Tashi,” he said, “was called to a religious life.”

In the corner, Kamala plunged the dishes into the water so that they clattered against each other. She began to scrub noisily, the water sloshing over the side of the bucket. Doso went on, “A beautiful boy, Tashi, who learned to shoot an arrow and ride a horse not long after he could walk, and impressed everyone who saw him because his skill was so great.”

Doso was interrupted by the sound of dogs barking somewhere within the manor walls. A hollow pounding resounded below them on the manor's outer door. It grew louder. There was someone outside, someone who had traveled through the storm and the darkness and now demanded entry.

*   *   *

The solitary traveler who entered the kitchen beside a scowling Doso stamped the snow from his boots and shook it from his coat and hat. He was a man of about Li Du's age, dressed in dark traveling clothes brightened by a red sash tied diagonally across his chest. His long hair, ornamented with silver and turquoise beads, was loose around his shoulders, mingling with the white fur at his coat collar. His nose, very thin and straight at the bridge, widened into a crooked tip.

“This is Sonam Dhargey,” said Doso.

With a smile, Sonam strode forward to the hearth and took a seat. His quick eyes took in the faces of the guests, then shifted to the corner, where they lingered on Kamala. He pulled a bowl from a pocket of his coat and gestured at one of the children to fill it for him.

“You have a full house, old friend,” he said to Doso. “I hope that you have room for another and will not turn me out into the storm.” There was something unpleasant in his speech, a subtle disrespect in the half smile on his full lips.

Doso filled Sonam's cup. “You know that I would never refuse hospitality to a traveler,” he said. “But how have you come so late? You cannot have crossed the pass in this weather.”

Sonam lifted his cup to Doso and drank deeply. “It is a bad storm. If I had been caught on the pass any later I would have been buried with my horse. The wind beat the cliff so hard that I thought I would be pounded into the stone—become a mountain spirit. It is fortunate that by the time darkness fell, I was almost at the bridge and could find my way to this house with no moon or stars.”

Appearing not to notice the tension in the room at the mention of the bridge, Sonam leaned forward and inhaled savory steam from the pot over the fire. “I dream of your wife's cooking,” he said. “It is better than all the food that the government officials buy to impress each other in Dajianlu.”

“Dhamo died today,” said Doso.

Sonam looked around the room, as if seeking confirmation of Doso's words. No one spoke. His features slackened in surprise, making him appear less intelligent, and less handsome. The veneer reasserted itself quickly. “Well,” he said, “Dhamo was not a young man. It will be a pity to lose the income from his paintings.”

Ignoring Sonam's remark, Doso gave a terse summary of what had happened. As he listened, Sonam's eyes shifted around the circle, assessing the company one at a time. “I have seen corpses on mountains before,” he said when Doso had finished. “And on these roads, even monks are not safe from cutthroats. I have seen the remains of the diseased, the starved, the frozen. But suicide in the forest—that is not so common.”

Sonam's spectral corpses seemed to insinuate themselves into the kitchen. Shadows spread across the wall with new menace. Sonam tore a piece of bread from the plate Kamala had set down and began to eat. “Tell me then,” he said to Doso, “what drove Dhamo to such an end? When I last saw him, he was painting in his studio as if he had no desire in the world but to continue. I would have expected him to refuse death out of fear that in his next life he wouldn't know how to paint.”

The last statement earned Sonam an appreciative nod from Hamza.

“Dhamo's path was his own,” said Doso, with stern finality.

Sonam shrugged. His eyes moved to the woman sitting across the fire from him, and remained there. She did not return his stare.

“I have not seen you here before,” Sonam said.

She looked up. “The lord and his wife are so kind to let me stay,” she said, but did not offer anything more.

Sonam shrugged, then looked around him. “I saw Pema downstairs with the animals,” he said. “So he is as slow with his work as he ever was.”

Listening to him, Li Du felt that he had heard Sonam's voice before. Something in the rough, low syllables resonated in his memory, but he could not connect them to a specific time or place.

As the conversation turned to speculations on the duration of the storm, Li Du felt the unease beneath the clipped, polite voices.
We are all thinking of the dead man,
he thought.
We are all wondering what form he will take in our dreams tonight.

*   *   *

Beneath Li Du's feet, the wooden floor of the hallway felt old and sturdy, as if the manor had adopted some of the hard permanence of the mountain into which it had settled.

He had almost reached his room when a rattling sound made him stop and look to his right. The light from his taper, a sliver of pinewood saturated with pitch, illuminated a door, and he saw that the bolt holding it shut was not secure. He reached out to adjust it, but in doing so accidentally released the bolt entirely. The wind caught the door and slammed it outward. Li Du's taper was instantly snuffed, and he was pulled, stumbling, out onto a platform engulfed in snow.

The freezing air knocked the breath from him. He could see that he was at the top of an exterior staircase leading down to the courtyard. Nothing else was visible through the snow except for a faint glow coming from a building he could not identify. He grappled for the edge of the door and hauled it closed as he retreated backward into the hallway. Then he slid the bolt into place and hurried to his room.

With shaking fingers, he used a flint to light the candle by the bed. He held three pine tapers to the flame and slid them into the hanging brazier. Light glowed through perforated shapes—triangles and diamonds—in the copper. As soon as he had pulled off his boots he sat on the bed, his back against the wall, and drew the blankets up around him.

In the sudden burst of cold, a memory had escaped a chamber in his mind. It was a memory of a winter afternoon in Beijing. He had been leaving the library, and the wind had caught the door, blowing it wide open and almost pulling his hat from his head.

In the cold manor bedroom, Li Du tried to clear his mind and return to the present. He did not like to think of Beijing. But as fatigue began to creep over him, he could not contain the memory.

Was it ten years ago? Twelve? The wind whirled dry leaves around him as he climbed the hill from the library to his favorite teahouse. He looked down at what remained of the rice crop in the Emperor's pleasure garden. The neat square pools were covered in a transparent glaze of ice, from which the browning leaves of rice plants protruded sadly, drooping toward each other as if they were discussing their bad situation. No one had expected the Emperor's agricultural experiment to succeed, and it hadn't. But the Emperor was away on a campaign, and when he returned he would almost certainly be consumed by some new interest.

The teahouse was warm and fragrant, crowded with conversations and hazy with steam. It was a favorite haunt of scholars. Two Jesuits argued over a sketched diagram unrolled across a table. Across from them, two court scholars looked forlornly down at their cups and watched the pot grow cold just out of their reach. The foreigners had used it to hold down a corner of the paper. Li Du found Shu, and they fell into a discussion of the Emperor's campaign against Galdan, leader of the Dzungar Mongols.

Li Du followed the paths of dream and memory out of the teahouse and into the courtyard outside his home. It was evening now, and the moon was full. Its light slipped down the curving roof tiles like water and cast shadows of plants on the door. Li Du heard steps within, and the voice of his wife. She was talking to her sister, who was going to have a child, and their aunt, who was giving them advice. He heard the clatter of game tiles on the table. He looked up at the moon. It was uncommunicative, a flat, featureless disk.
A circle,
Li Du thought,
a circle painted white.

 

Chapter 5

Li Du woke the next morning to a gray dawn seeping through the shuttered windows. For several minutes he did not move, except to trace with his eyes the unfamiliar map of cracks across the ceiling beams that had been invisible to him in the dark the night before. Half awake, he attempted to impose on it the route the caravan had taken. If that cobwebby rift there was the gorge southeast of Gyalthang, then that knot could be the trading post. But the trails disappeared as he looked at them and his wandering gaze lost its way. He pushed away the blankets and got up.

When he had readied himself to quit the room, he rummaged through his saddlebag for his bowl. It was a silver-plated wooden dish that he had purchased on the outskirts of Kunming almost a year before. “You are in our territory now,” the merchant had said, proud to be explaining things to someone ignorant of local custom. He held up a silver bowl, the outside of which was engraved with a simple depiction of leaping deer. “If you are going to be traveling with caravans, carry a silver bowl. Silver jewelry for luck, silver chopsticks for food, and a silver bowl for avoiding bad water. If you dip the bowl in a stream and find it turns black, that's poison, and you had better not drink it.”