The Years of Rice and Salt

  “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 centred, 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. As if I was flying.”

  “Come again, please. Perhaps your hun-soul too can be called forth.” He nodded, frowning still, 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 travelling 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 travelling races on Earth — the Jews, the Christians, the Zotti. 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 honoured and given some peace. Kang had said the Surangama Sutra, which expounded the rulai-zang, a state of empty mind, tranquil mind, true mind.

  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 Surangama Sutra: 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.]

  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 i
n 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 any more,” 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, colouring 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.”

  “Not respectable people!”

  He narrowed his eyes, looking suddenly Chinese. “Respect from whom?”

  She looked away. “I cannot marry you. You are hui, and I am one who has not yet died.”

  “The Ming emperors ordered all hui to marry good Chinese women, so that their children would be Chinese. My mother was a Chinese woman.”

  She looked up, surprised again. Her face was flushed.

  “Please,” he said, hand out. “I know it’s a new idea. A shock. I’m sorry. Please think about it, before you make your final reply. Consider it.”

  She straightened up and faced him formally. “I will consider it.”

  A flick of the hand indicated her desire to be left alone, and with a truncated farewell, ended by a phrase in another language, spoken most intently, he made his way out of the compound.

  • • •

  After that, the widow Kang wandered through her household. Pao was out in the kitchen, ordering the girls about, and Kang asked her to come and speak to her in the garden. Pao followed her out, and Kang told her what had happened, and Pao laughed.

  “Why do you laugh?” Kang snapped. “Do you think I care so much for a testimonial from a Qing Emperor! That I should — lock myself in this box for the rest of my life, for the sake of a paper covered with vermilion ink?”

  Pao froze, first startled, then frightened. “But, Mistress Kang Gansu . . .”

  “You know nothing about it. Leave me.”

  After that no one dared to speak to her. She wandered the house like a hungry ghost, acknowledging no one. She scarcely spoke. She visited the shrine at the Temple of the Purple Bamboo Grove, and recited the Diamond Sutra five times, and went home with her knees hurting. The poem of Li Anzi, “Sudden View of Years” came to her mind:

  Sometimes all the threads on the loom

  Suggest the carpet to come.

  Then we know that our children-to-be

  Hope for us in the bardo.

  For them we weave until our arms grow tired.

  [Li Anzi: the mother of two successful officials, who reared them alone as a widow.]

  She had the servants carry her to the magistrate’s building, where she had them set down the sedan chair, and did not move for an hour. The men could just see her face behind the gauze of the window curtain. They took her home without her ever having emerged.

  The next day she had them carry her to the cemetery, though it was not a festival day, and under the empty sky she shuffled about with her peculiar gait, sweeping the graves of all the family ancestors, then sitting at the foot of her husband’s grave, head in her hands.

  The next day she went down to the river on her own, walking the entire way, crimping along, looking at trees, ducks, the clouds in the sky. She sat on the riverbank, as still as if she were in one of the temples.

  Xinwu, was down there as he almost always was, trailing his fishing pole and bamboo basket. He brightened at the sight of her, showed her the fish he had caught. He sat by her, and they watched the great brown river flow past, glossy and compact. He fished, she sat and watched.

  “You’re good at that,” she said, watching him flick the line out into the stream.

  “My father taught me.” After a time: “I miss him.”

  “I do too.” Then: “Do you think .
. . I wonder what he would think.”

  After another pause: “If we move west, you must come with us.”

  • • •

  She invited Ibrahim to return, and when he came, Pao led him into the reception hall, which Kang had ordered filled with flowers.

  He stood before her, head bowed.

  “I am old,” she told him. “I have passed through all the life stages. I am one who has not yet died. I cannot go backwards. I cannot give you any sons.”

  [The life stages: milk teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.]

  “I understand,” he murmured. “I too am old. Still — I ask your hand in marriage. Not for sons, but for me.”

  She regarded him, her colour rising.

  “Then I accept your offer of marriage.”

  He smiled.

  After that the household was as if caught in a whirlwind. The servants, though highly critical of the match, nevertheless had to work all day every day to make the place ready in time for the fifteenth day of the sixth month, the midsummer time traditionally favoured for starting travel. Kang’s elder sons disapproved of the match, of course, but made plans to attend the wedding anyway. The neighbours were scandalized, shocked beyond telling, but as they were not invited, there was no way for them to express this to the Kang household. The widow’s sisters at the temple congratulated her and wished her well. “You can bring the wisdom of the Buddha to the hui,” they told her. “It will be very useful for all.”

  So they were married in a small ceremony attended by all Kang’s sons, and only Shih was less than congratulatory, pouting most of the morning in his room, a fact Pao did not even report to Kang. After the ceremony, held in the garden, the party spread down to the river, and though small, it was determinedly cheery. After that the household was packed up, its furniture and goods loaded in carts either destined for their new home in the west, or else for the orphanage that Kang had helped establish in town, or for her elder sons.

  When all was ready, Kang took a last walk through the household, stopping to stare into the bare rooms, oddly small now.