The Years of Rice and Salt (62 page)

“So our little jati is stuck here with everyone else, no matter what you do, not that you have been notably effectual, I must say again, Bai, speaking of your tendency toward credulous simplicity, gullibility, and general soft-hearted namby-pamby ineffectiveness—”

“Hey,” Bai said. “Not fair. I've been helping you. I've just been going along with you.”

“Well, all right. Granted. In any case we're all in the bardo together now, and headed for the lower realms again, at best the realm of the human, but possibly spinning down the death spiral into the hellworlds always underfoot, we may have done it and are in the spin you can't pull out of, humanity lost to us for a time even as a possibility, so much harm have we done. Stupid fucking bastards! Damn it, do you think I haven't been trying too?” Kuo popped to his feet, agitated. “Do you think you're the only one who has tried to make some good in this world?” He shook his solitary fist at Bai, and then at the lowering gray clouds. “But we failed! We killed reality itself, do you understand me! Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Bai said, hugging his knees and shivering miserably. “I understand.”

“So. Now we are in this lower realm. We must make do. Our dharma still commands right action, even here. In the hope of small advances upward. Until reality itself be reestablished, by many millions of lives of effort. The whole world will have to be rebuilt. That's where we are now,” and with a farewell tap to Bai's arm he walked away, sinking into the black mud deeper with every step, until he had disappeared.

“Hey,” Bai said. “Kuo! Don't leave!”

After a while Iwa returned and stood before him, looked down quizzically at him.

“Well?” Bai said, lifting his head from his knees, collecting himself. “What is it? Will they save the Bodhi Tree?”

“Don't worry about the tree,” Iwa said. “They'll get a shoot from a daughter tree in Lanka. It's happened before. Best worry about the people.”

“More shoots there too. On to the next life. To a better time.” Bai shouted it after Kuo: “To a better time!”

Iwa sighed. He sat down where Kuo had been sitting. Rain fell on them. A long time passed in exhausted silence.

“The thing is,” Iwa said, “what if there is no next life? That's what I think. This is it. Fan Chen said the soul and body are just two aspects of the same thing. He speaks of sharpness and the knife, soul and body. Without knife, no sharpness.”

“Without sharpness, no knife.”

“Yes . . .”

“And sharpness goes on, sharpness never dies.”

“But look at those dead bodies over there. Who they were won't come back. When death comes, we don't come back.”

Bai thought of the Indian man, lying so still on the ground. He said, “You're just distraught. Of course we come back. I was talking to Kuo this very minute.”

Iwa gazed at him. “You shouldn't try to hold on, Bai. This is what the Buddha learned, right here. Don't try to stop time. No one can do it.”

“Sharpness remains. I tell you, he was cutting me up same as always!”

“We have to try to accept change. And change leads to death.”

“And then through death.” Bai said this as cheerfully as he could, but his voice was desolate. He missed Kuo.

Iwa considered what Bai had said, with a look that seemed to say he had been hoping that a Buddhist at the Bodhi Tree would perhaps have had something more helpful to say. But what could you say? The Buddha himself had said it: suffering is real. You have to face it, live with it. There is no escape.

After a while longer Bai got up and went over to see what the officers were doing. They were chanting a sutra, in Sanskrit perhaps, Bai thought, and he joined in softly with the “Lengyan jing,” in Chinese. And as the day wore on many Buddhists in both armies gathered around the site, hundreds of them, the mud was covered with people, and they said prayers in all the languages of Buddhism, standing there on the burnt land that smoked in the rain for as far as the eye could see, black gray and silver. Finally they fell silent. Peace in the heart, compassion, peace. Sharpness remained in them.

BOOK 9

NSARA

1
                                                                                                            

On sunny mornings the parks on the lakefront were filled with families out walking. In the early spring, before the plants had done more than create the tight green buds soon to blossom in their profusion of colors, the hungry swans would congregate in the gleaming black water beside the promenade to fight over the loaves of stale bread thrown at them by children. This had been one of Budur's favorite activities as a young girl, it had cast her into gales of laughter to see the swans flop and tussle for the scraps; now she watched the new kids convulsed by the same hilarity, with a stab of grief for her lost childhood, and for the awareness that the swans, though beautiful and comical, were also desperate and starving. She wished she had the boldness to join the children and throw more bread to the poor things. But if she did it now she would look odd, like one of the mentally deficient ones on their trip out from their school. And in any case there was not a great deal of bread left in their house anyway.

Sunlight bounced on the water, and the buildings lining the back of the lakeshore promenade glowed lemon, peach, and apricot, as if lit from within by some light trapped in their stone. Budur walked back through the old town toward home, through the gray granite and black wood of the ancient buildings. Turi had begun as a Roman town, a way station on their main route through the Alps; Father had once driven them up to an obscure alpine pass called the Keyhole, where a stretch of the Roman road was still there, switchbacking through the grass like a petrified dragon's back, looking lonely for the feet of soldiers and traders. Now after centuries of obscurity Turi was a way station again, this time for trains, and the greatest city in all of central Firanja, the capital of the united Alpine emirates.

The city center was bustling and squeaky with trams, but Budur liked to walk. She ignored Ahab, her chaperone; though she liked him personally, a simple man with few pretensions, she did not like his job, which included accompanying her on her excursions. She shunned him on principle as an affront to her dignity. She knew also that he would report her behavior to Father, and when he reported her refusal to acknowledge his presence, yet another small protest of harem would reach Father, if only indirectly.

She led Ahab up through the apartments studding the hillside overlooking the city, to High Street. The wall around their house was beautiful, a tall patterned weave of green and gray dressed stones. The wooden gate was topped by a stone arch seemingly held in a network of wisteria vines; you could pull out the keystone and it would still stand. Ahmet, their gatekeeper, was in his seat in the cozy little wooden closet on the inside of the gateway, where he held forth to all who wanted to pass, his tea tray ready to serve those who had time to tarry.

Inside the house Aunt Idelba was talking on the telephone, which was set on a table in the inner courtyard under the eaves, where anyone could hear you. This was Father's way of trying to keep anything untoward from ever being said, but the truth was that Aunt Idelba was usually talking about microscopic nature and the mathematics of the interiors of atoms, and so no one could have any idea what she was talking about. Budur liked to listen to her anyway, because it reminded her of the fairy tales Aunt Idelba had told in the past when Budur was younger, or her cooking talk with Mother in the kitchen—cooking was one of her passions, and she would rattle off recipes, procedures, and tools, all mysterious and suggestive just like this talk on the telephone, as if she were cooking up a new world. And sometimes she would get off the phone looking worried, and absentmindedly accept Budur's hugs and admit that this was precisely the case: the ilmi, the scientists, were indeed cooking up a new world. Or they could be. Once she rang off flushed pink, and danced a little minuet around the courtyard, singing nonsense syllables, and their laundry ditty, “God is great, great is God, clean our clothes, clean our souls.”

This time she rang off and did not even see Budur, but stared up at the bit of sky visible from the courtyard.

“What is it, Idelba? Are you feeling hem?” Hem was the women's term for a kind of mild depression that had no obvious cause.

Idelba shook her head. “No, this is a mushkil,” which was a specific problem.

“What is it?”

“Well . . . Simply put, the investigators at the laboratory are getting some very strange results. That's what it comes down to. No one can say what they mean.”

This laboratory Idelba talked to over the phone was currently her main contact with the world outside their home. She had been a mathematics teacher and researcher in Nsara, and, with her husband, an investigator of microscopic nature. But her husband's untimely death had revealed some irregularities in his affairs, and Idelba had been left destitute; and the job they had shared had turned out to be his in the end, so that she had nowhere to work, and nowhere to live. Or so Yasmina had said; Idelba herself never spoke about it. She had shown up one day with a single suitcase, weeping, to confer with Budur's father, her half brother. He had agreed to put her up for a time. This, Father explained later, was one of the things harems were for; they protected women who had nowhere else to go. “Your mother and you girls complain about the system, but really, what is the alternative? The suffering of women left alone would be enormous.”

Mother and Budur's older cousin, Yasmina, would snort or snarl at this, cheeks turning red. Rema and Aisha and Fatima would look at them curiously, trying to understand what they should feel about what to them was after all the natural order of things. Aunt Idelba never said anything about it one way or the other, neither thanks nor complaint. Old acquaintances still called her on the phone, especially a nephew of hers, who apparently had a problem he thought she could help him with; he called regularly. Once Idelba tried to explain why to Budur and her sisters, with the aid of a blackboard and chalk.

“Atoms have shells around them, like the spheres in the heavens in the old drawings, all surrounding the heartknot of the atom, which is small but heavy. Three kinds of particles clump together in the heartknot, some with yang, some with yin, some neuter, in different amounts for each substance, and they're held bound together there by a strong force, which is very strong, but also very local, in that you don't have to get far away from the heartknot for the force to reduce a great deal.”

“Like a harem,” Yasmina said.

“Yes, well. That may be more like gravity, I'm afraid. But anyway, there is a qi repulsion between all particles, that the strong force counteracts, and the two compete, more or less, along with other forces. Now, certain very heavy metals have so many particles that a certain number leak away from them one by one, and the single particles that leak leave distinctive traces at distinct rates of speed. And down in Nsara they've been getting strange results from a particular heavy metal, an elemental that is heavier than gold, the heaviest elemental found so far, called alactin. They're bombarding it with neuter particles, and getting very strange results, all over the plates, in a way hard to explain. The heavy heart of this elemental appears to be unstable.”

“Like Yasmina!”

“Yes, well, interesting that you say so, in that it is not true but it suggests the way we keep trying to think of ways to visualize these things that are always too small for us to see.” She paused, looking at the blackboard, then at her uncomprehending students. A spasm of some emotion marred her features, disappeared. “Well. It is yet another phenomenon that needs explaining, let's leave it at that. It will take more investigation in a lab.”

After that she scribbled in silence for a while. Numbers, letters, Chinese ideograms, equations, dots, diagrams—like something out of the illustrations for the books about the Alchemist of Samarqand.

After a time she slowed down, shrugged. “I'll have to talk to Piali about it.”

“But isn't he in Nsara?” Budur asked.

“Yes.” This too was part of her mishkul, Budur saw. “We will talk by the telephone, of course.”

“Tell us about Nsara,” Budur asked for the thousandth time.

Idelba shrugged; she was not in the mood. She never was, to begin with; it took a while to break through the barrier of regrets to get her to that time. Her first husband, divorcing her near the end of her fertility, with no children; her second husband, dying young; she had a lot of regrets to get through. But if Budur was patient and merely followed her around the terrace, and in and out of rooms, she often would make the passage, helped perhaps by her shifts from room to room, matching the way each place on Earth we have lived in is like a room in our mind, with its sky for a roof, hills for walls, and buildings for furniture, so that our lives have moved from one room to the next in some larger structure; and the old rooms still exist and yet at the same time are gone, or emptied, so that in reality one could only move on to some new room, or stay locked in the one you were in, as in a jail; and yet, in the mind . . .

First Idelba would speak of the weather there, the storm-tossed Atlantic rolling in with water, wind, cloud, rain, fog, sleet, mist, sometimes snow, all broken by sunny days with their low shards of light emblazoning the seafront and the rivermouth, the docks of the giant city filling the valley on both banks all the way upstream to Anjou, all the states of Asia and Firanja come west to this westernmost town, to meet the other great influx by sea, people from all over the world, including the handsome Hodenosaunee, and the shivering exiles from Inka, with their serapes and gold jewelry splashing the dark gray afternoons of the storm-thrashed winters with little bits of metallic color. These exotics all together made Nsara fascinating, Idelba said, as did the unwelcome embassies of the Chinese and Travancoris, enforcing the terms of the postwar settlement, standing there like monuments to the Islamic defeat in the war, long windowless blocks at the back of the harbor district. As she described all this, Idelba's eyes would begin to gleam and her voice grow animated, and she almost always, if she did not cut herself short, ended by exclaiming Nsara! Nsara! Ohhh, Nssssarrrrra! And then sometimes sit down wherever she was and hold her head in her hands, overwhelmed. It was, Budur was sure, the most exciting and wonderful city on Earth.

The Travancoris had of course founded a Buddhist monastery school there, as they had in every city and town on Earth, it seemed, with all the most modern departments and laboratories, right next to the old madressa and the mosque, still operating much as they had been since the 900s. The Buddhist monks and teachers made the clerics of the madressa look very ignorant and provincial, Idelba said, but they were always courteous to Muslim practices, very unobtrusive and respectful, and over time a number of Sufi teachers and reformist clerics had eventually built laboratories of their own, and had taken classes at the monastery schools to prepare to work on questions of natural law in their own establishments. “They gave us time to swallow and digest the bitter pill of our defeat,” Idelba said of these Buddhists. “The Chinese were smart to stay away and let these people be their emissaries. That way we never really see how ruthless the Chinese are. We think the Travancoris are the whole story.”

But it seemed to Budur that the Chinese were not so hard as they could have been. The reparation payments were within the realm of the possible, Father admitted, or if they were not, the debts were always being forgiven, or put off. And in Firanja, at least, the Buddhist monastery schools and hospitals were the only signs of the victors of the war imposing their will—almost; that dark part, the shadow of the conquerors, opium, was becoming more and more common in Firanji cities, and Father declared angrily after reading the newspapers that as it all came from Afghanistan and Burma, its shipment to Firanja was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese. Even in Turi one saw the poor souls in the working district cafés downriver, stupefied by the odd-smelling smoke, and in Nsara Idelba said the drug was widespread, like any other world city in that regard, even though it was Islam's world city, the only Islamic capital not destroyed by the war: Konstantiniyye, Cairo, Moscow, Tehran, Zanzibar, Damascus, and Baghdad had been firebombed, and not yet completely rebuilt.

But Nsara had survived, and now it was the Sufis' city, the scientists' city, Idelba's city; she had gone to it after a childhood in Turi and at the family farm in the Alps; she had gone to school there, and mathematical formulations had spoken to her as if speaking aloud from the page; she understood them, she spoke that strange alchemical language. Old men explained its rules of grammar to her, and she followed them and did the work, learned more, made her mark in theoretical speculations about the nature of microscopic matter when she was only twenty years old. “Young minds are often the strongest in math,” she said later, already outside the experience itself. Into the labs of Nsara, then, helping the famous Lisbi and his team to bolt a cyclic accelerator together, getting married, then getting divorced, then, apparently very quickly, rather mysteriously, Budur thought, getting remarried, which was almost unheard of in Turi; working again with her second husband, very happily, then his unexpected death; and her again mysterious return to Turi, her retreat.

Budur asked once, “Did you wear the veil there?”

“Sometimes,” Idelba said. “It depended on the situation. The veil has a kind of power, in certain situations. All such signs stand for other things; they are sentences spoken in matter. The hijab can say to strangers, ‘I am Islamic and in solidarity with my men, against you and all the world.' To Islamic men it can say, ‘I will play this foolish game, this fantasy of yours, but only if in return you do everything I tell you to.' For some men this trade, this capitulation to love, is a kind of release from the craziness of being a man. So the veil can be like putting on a magician queen's cape.” But seeing Budur's hopeful expression she added, “Or it can be like putting on a slave's collar, certainly.”