The Years of Rice and Salt (44 page)

“But you can,” Ibrahim said. “Very clear.”

“I think I knew you,” she whispered. “You and Bao, and my son Shih, and Pao, and certain others. I . . . it's like that moment one sometimes feels, when it seems that whatever is happening has already happened before, in just the same way.”

Ibrahim nodded. “I have felt that. Elsewhere in the Quran, it says, ‘I tell you of a truth, that the spirits which now have affinity will be kindred together, although they all meet in new persons and names.' ”

“Truly?” Kang exclaimed.

“Yes. And elsewhere again, it says, ‘His body falls off like the shell of a crab, and he forms a new one. The person is only a mask which the soul puts on for a season, wears for its proper time, and then casts off, and another is worn in its stead.' ”

Kang stared at him, mouth open. “I can scarcely believe what I am hearing,” she whispered. “There has been no one I can tell these things. They think me mad. I am known now as a . . .”

Ibrahim nodded and sipped his tea. “I understand. But I am interested in these things. I have had certain—intimations, myself. Perhaps then we can try the process of putting you under a description, and see what we can learn?”

Kang nodded decisively. “Yes.”

Because he wanted darkness, they settled on a window seat in the reception hall, with its window shuttered and the doors closed. A single candle burned on a low table. The lenses of his glasses reflected the flame. The house had been ordered to be silent, and faintly they could hear dog barks, cart wheels, the general hum of the city in the distance, all very faint.

Ibrahim took Widow Kang by the wrist, very loosely, fingers cool and light against her pulse, at which sensation her pulse quickened; surely he could feel it. But he had her look into the candle flame, and he spoke in Persian, Arabic, and Chinese: low chanting, with no emphasis of tone, a gentle murmur. She had never heard such a voice.

“You are walking in the cool dew of the morning, all is peaceful, all is well. In the heart of the flame the world unfolds like a flower. You breathe in the flower, slowly in, slowly out. All the sutras speak through you into this flower of light. All is centered, flowing up and down your spine like the tide. Sun, moon, stars, in their places, wheeling around us, holding us.”

In like manner he murmured on and on, until Kang's pulse was steady at all three levels, a floating, hollow pulse, her breathing deep and relaxed. She truly appeared to Ibrahim to have left the room, through the portal of the candle flame. He had never had anyone leave him so quickly.

“Now,” he suggested, “you travel in the spirit world, and see all your lives. Tell me what you see.”

Her voice was high and sweet, unlike her usual voice. “I see an old bridge, very ancient, across a dry stream. Bao is young, and wears a white robe. People follow me over the bridge to a . . . a place. Old and new.”

“What are you wearing?”

“A long . . . shift. Like night garments. It's warm. People call out as we pass.”

“What are they saying?”

“I don't understand it.”

“Just make the sounds they make.”

“In sha ar am. In sha ar am. There are people on horses. Oh—there you are. You too are young. They want something. People cry out. Men on horses approach. They're coming fast. Bao warns me—”

She shuddered. “Ah!” she said, in her usual voice. Her pulse became leathery, almost a spinning-bean pulse. She shook her head hard, looked up at Ibrahim. “What was that? What happened?”

“You were gone. Seeing something else. Do you remember?”

She shook her head.

“Horses?”

She closed her eyes. “Horses. A rider. Cavalry. I was in trouble!”

“Hmm.” He released her wrist. “Possibly so.”

“What was it?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps some . . . Do you speak any—no. You said already that you did not. But in this hun travel, you seemed to be hearing Arabic.”

“Arabic?”

“Yes. A common prayer. Many Muslims would recite it in Arabic, even if that was not their language. But . . .”

She shuddered. “I have to rest.”

“Of course.”

She looked at him, her eyes filling with tears. “I . . . can it be—why me, though—” She shook her head and her tears fell. “I don't understand why this is happening!”

He nodded. “We so seldom understand why things happen.”

She laughed shortly, a single “Ho!” Then: “But I like to understand.”

“So do I. Believe me; it is my chief delight. Rare as it is.” A small smile, or grimace of chagrin, offered for her to share. A shared understanding, of their solitary frustration at understanding so little.

Kang took a deep breath and stood. “I appreciate your assistance. You will come again, I trust?”

“Of course.” He stood as well. “Anything, madam. I feel that we have just begun.”

She was suddenly startled, looking through him. “Banners flew, do you remember?”

“What?”

“You were there.” She smiled apologetically, shrugged. “You too were there.”

He was frowning, trying to understand her. “Banners . . .” He seemed lost himself for a while. “I . . .” He shook his head. “Maybe. I recall—it used to be, when I saw banners, as a child in Iran, it would mean so much to me. More than could be explained. Like I was flying.”

“Come again, please. Perhaps your hun soul too can be called forth.”

He nodded, frowning, as if still in pursuit of a receding thought, a banner in memory. Even as he said his farewells and left, he was still distracted.

He returned
within the week, and they had another session “inside the candle” as Kang called it. From the depths of her trance she burst into speech that neither of them understood—not Ibrahim as it happened, nor Kang when he read back to her what he had written down.

He shrugged, looking shaken. “I will ask some colleagues. Of course, it may be some language totally lost to us now. We must concentrate on what you see.”

“But I remember nothing! Or very little. As you recall dreams, that slip away on waking.”

“When you are actually inside the candle, then, I must be clever, ask the right questions.”

“But if I don't understand you? Or if I answer in this other tongue?”

He nodded. “But you seem to understand me, at least partly. There must be translation in more than one realm. Or there may be more to the hun soul than has been suspected. Or the tendril that keeps you in contact with the traveling hun soul conveys other parts of what you know. Or it is the po soul that understands.” He threw up his hands: who could say?

Then something struck her, and she put her hand to his arm. “There was a landslide!”

They stood together in silence. Faintly the air quivered.

He went away puzzled, distracted. At every departure he left bemused, and at every return he was fairly humming with ideas, with anticipation of their next voyage into the candle.

“A colleague in Beijing thinks it may be a form of Berber that you are speaking. At other times, Tibetan. Do you know these places? Morocco is at the other end of the world, the west end of Africa, in the north. It was Moroccans who repopulated al-Andalus when the Christians died.”

“Ah,” she said, but shook her head. “I was always Chinese, I am sure. It must be an old Chinese dialect.”

He smiled, a rare and pleasant sight. “Chinese in your heart, perhaps. But I think our souls wander the whole world, life to life.”

“In groups?”

“People's destinies intertwine, as the Quran says. Like threads in your embroideries. Moving together like the traveling races on Earth—the Jews, the Christians, the Zott. Remnants of older ways, left without a home.”

“Or the new islands across the Eastern Sea, yes? So we might have lived there too, in the empires of gold?”

“Those may be Egyptians of ancient times, fled west from Noah's flood. Opinion is divided.”

“Whatever they are, I am certainly Chinese through and through. And always have been.”

He regarded her with a trace of his smile in his eye. “It does not sound like Chinese that you speak when inside the candle. And if life is inextinguishable, as it seems it might be, you may be older than China itself.”

She took a deep breath, sighed. “Easy to believe.”

The next time he came to put her under a description, it was night, so they could work in silence and darkness; so that the candle flame, the dim room, and the sound of his voice would be all that seemed to exist. It was the fifth day of the fifth month, an unlucky day, the day of the festival of hungry ghosts, when those poor preta who had no living descendants were honored and given some peace. Kang had said the Surangama Sutra, which expounded the rulai-zang, a state of empty mind, tranquil mind, true mind.

Spuriously Sanskrit, originally written in Chinese and titled “Lengyan jing.” The awareness it describes, changzhi, is sometimes called “Buddha-nature,” or tathagatagarbha, or “mind ground.” The sutra claims that devotees can be “suddenly awakened” to this state of high awareness.

She made the purification of the house rituals, and fasted, and she asked Ibrahim to do the same. So when the preparations were finally finished, they sat alone in the stuffy dark chamber, watching a candle burn. Kang entered into the flame almost the moment Ibrahim touched her wrist, her pulse flooding, a yin-in-yang pulse. Ibrahim watched her closely. She muttered in the language he could not understand, or perhaps another language yet. There was a sheen on her forehead, and she seemed distraught.

The flame of the candle shrank down to the size of a bean. Ibrahim swallowed hard, holding off fear, squinting with the effort.

She stirred, her voice grew more agitated.

“Tell me in Chinese,” he said gently. “Speak Chinese.”

She groaned, muttered. Then she said, very clearly, “My husband died. They wouldn't—they poisoned him, and they wouldn't accept a queen among them. They wanted what we had. Ah!” And she began again to speak in the other language. Ibrahim fixed her clearest words in mind, then saw that the candle's flame had grown again, but past its normal height, rising so high that the room grew hot and stifling, and he feared for the paper ceiling. “Please be calm, O spirits of the dead,” he said in Arabic, and Kang cried out in the voice not hers:

“No! No! We're trapped!” And then she was sobbing, crying her heart out. Ibrahim held her by the arms, gently squeezing her, and suddenly she looked up at him, seeming awake, and her eyes grew round. “You were there! You were with us, we were trapped by an avalanche, we were stuck there to die!”

He shook his head: “I don't remember—”

She struggled free and slapped him hard on the face. His spectacles flew across the room, she jumped on him and held him by the throat as if to strangle him, eyes locked on his, suddenly so much smaller. “You were there!” she shouted. “Remember! Remember!”

In her eyes he seemed to see it happen. “Oh!” he said, shocked, looking through her now. “Oh, my God. Oh . . .”

She released him, and he sank to the floor. He patted it as if searching for his glasses. “Inshallah, inshallah.” He groped about, looked up at her. “You were just a girl . . .”

“Ah,” she said, and collapsed onto the floor beside him. She was weeping now, eyes running, nose running. “It's been so long. I've been so alone.” She sniffed hard, wiped her eyes. “They keep killing us. We keep getting killed.”

“That's life,” he said, wiping his own eyes once. He collected himself. “That's what happens. Those are the ones you remember. You were a black boy, once, a beautiful black boy, I can see you now. And you were my friend once, old men together. We studied the world, we were friends. Such a spirit.”

The candle flame slowly dropped back to its normal height. They sat beside each other on the floor, too drained to move.

Eventually Pao knocked hesitantly on the door, and they started guiltily, though they had both been lost in their own thoughts. They got up and sat in the window seats, and Kang called out to Pao to bring some peach juice. By the time she came with it they were both composed; Ibrahim had relocated his spectacles, and Kang had opened the window shutter to the night air. The light of a clouded half-moon added to the glow of the candle flame.

Hands still shaking, Kang sipped some peach juice, nibbled on a plum. Her body too was trembling. “I'm not sure I can do that anymore,” she said, looking away. “It's too much.”

He nodded. They went into the compound garden, and sat in the cool of the night under the clouds, eating and drinking. They were hungry. The scent of jasmine filled the dark air. Though they did not speak, they seemed companionable.

I am older than China itself

I walked in the jungle hunting for food

Sailed the seas across the world

Fought in the long war of the asuras.

They cut me and I bled. Of course. Of course.

No wonder my dreams are so wild,

No wonder I feel so tired. No wonder I am always

Angry.

Clouds mass, concealing a thousand peaks;

Winds sweep, coloring ten thousand trees.

Come to me husband and let us live

The next ten lives together.

The next time Ibrahim visited, his face was solemn, and he was dressed more finely than they had seen before, in the garb of a Muslim cleric, it seemed.

After the usual greetings, when they were alone again in the garden, he stood and faced her.

“I must return to Gansu,” he said. “I have family matters I must attend to. And my Sufi master has need of me in his madressa. I've put it off as long as I could, but I have to go.”

Kang looked aside. “I will be sorry.”

“Yes. I also. There is much still to discuss.”

Silence.

Then Ibrahim stirred and spoke again. “I have thought of a way to solve this problem, this separation between us, so unwished for, which is that you should marry me—accept my proposal of marriage and marry me, and bring you and your people with you out with me, to Gansu.”

The Widow Kang looked utterly astonished. Her mouth hung open.

“Why—I cannot marry. I am a widow.”

Ibrahim said, “But widows may remarry. I know the Qing try to discourage it, but Confucius says nothing at all against it. I have looked, and checked with the best experts. People do it.”