At the Heart of the Universe (29 page)

Pep has read that the Buddhist monasteries were one of the “Four Olds” that Mao ordered to be destroyed. After the Cultural Revolution, on the Four Sacred Mountains—Emei Shan being one of them—many temples were rebuilt for the tourist industry, populated with token monks and nuns. They are free to practice Buddhism as long as there aren't too many of them and they don't try to proselytize. This monastery is not yet on the tourist map, and is still in decline. Following Xiao Lu to their places at a bench, Pep assesses the skeletal crew of monks and nuns that remains. All are elderly, and seem worn, much like their faded robes, which hang loosely on their spare, wrinkled frames. The robes are threadbare at the elbows, and patched. Their teeth are bad, their skin sallow. They seem barely capable of keeping the enterprise going—as if the nursing home residents are running the facility. Everything is dirty and forlorn and echoing with decay. The place is too big for the people in it. A ghost temple. And always in back of it, out there growing like the night over the temples, the black mountain.

“Kind of sad, isn't it?” Pep asks Clio.

“Yes, yes, it is. But I'm in awe of it. They've been doing this here, continuously through hell and high water, since the fourth century—almost two thousand years! Hats off to them. I only wish there were some young ones, who would carry it on.”

As they walk in, the Macys see some of the monks and nuns pointing at Xiao Lu and Katie, gossiping among themselves. It is clear that everyone now knows this secret of Xiao Lu's life. The last ones to sit down, Xiao Lu and the Macys have to squeeze into the space between two of the nuns at one of the long picnic benches. Clio, Katie, and Xiao Lu slip in easily. Pep, last, has trouble fitting his big frame into the last single-person slot. He can get his first leg in okay, but when it comes to his second, it takes all his contorting to do so without hitting the neighboring monk in the back of the head with his foot. This is made more difficult by all eyes being fixed on this struggle, as if he's a living sutra—say,
the Sutra of Human Clumsiness. He doesn't care all that much, for he's frantically trying to control his dirt phobia, all this encrusted gunk and current dust.

The nuns lean in toward Xiao Lu and whisper insistently to her. She seems to shrivel up, wrapping herself tightly in her vest, staring down at the empty bowl before her. Pep, Clio, and Katie are intensely aware of the change in her mood. Clearly she is embarrassed and on guard, and has no wish to relate to the nuns. She is stony in her silence, her withdrawal. The noise itself seems to bother her—she covers her ears and bows her head, as if she is trying to protect herself until she can escape.

Finally the hall falls silent. A small bell sings out.

Each monk and nun does a private meditation on his or her empty food bowl, moving lips in silent prayer. Finally the food is ladled out in wooden spoons from two king-sized steel pots.

Through gesture and his passport, Pep asks if anyone speaks English. Except for a few words—“yes,” “no,” “hello,” “goodbye,” “New York,” “Nixon,” “Wisconsin”—they do not. French or German? No. The Macys and Xiao Lu shake their heads—it is a tremendous disappointment, and dooms them to this sign-and-picture-drawing language. Pep then asks, through gesture, about a telephone. None. The bare bulbs dangling from cords from the ceiling mean electricity, and there's running water—but that's about it. Green tea is offered. They ask for bottled water. None. Coca-Cola or Sprite or any other bottled drink? Nothing.

“Well, Kate-zer, this is a first. If a place doesn't have Coke, it's officially designated as ‘In the Middle of Nowhere.' In the old days, when they came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote, ‘Here Bee Dragons,' and drew pictures of dragons. That's where we are. Dragon Country.”

“So, dear, we have to be really careful about the water. You can either drink tea or water that's boiled and that we let cool.”

“I know, Mom. It's okay.”

The Macys are ravenous and try the food. It is a greasy stew with evidence of vegetables, but also of other things they cannot identify. The oil smells rancid.

“Incredibly salty!” Clio says.

“Whoa! Solid salt!” Pep says, mouth puckering. “Like eating a salt lick, yeah.”

“I like it,” Katie says, smiling broadly. “And look, they've got rice.”

“I know,” Clio says. “You want soy sauce, but there's no way to ask—”

“Jung yoo,” Katie says. “Remember at Shalom Hunan they said it's called jung yoo?” She looks at Xiao Lu and mimes shaking a bottle and asks, “Jung yoo?”

“Jung yoo!” Xiao Lu says suddenly and loudly, laughing, covering her mouth with her hand as many of the Chinese women they've seen do. The monks and nuns look at Katie and point their chopsticks and laugh and say, “Jung yoo jung—”

Crack!
—a sharp sound, from the end of the table. They jump. Silence.

The head monk, of great age and steely thinness. His long, lined face is crowned by shorn cotton-white hair like a dusting of snow, his chin adorned with a long, snowy goatee. He has slammed a wooden umbrella down on the wooden table. He shouts toward the kitchen. A tiny man in a spattered apron, beneath which are bare ankles and duck feet, runs in and puts a bottle of soy sauce in front of Katie.

“Shay shay,” Katie says. She puts it on her rice.

Xiao Lu puts it on her rice, and even puts some in her stew. Katie follows suit.

Clio and Pep look at each other. From the very first, Katie has loved anything salty, and nothing sweet. While her friends snack on cookies and candies and sweet sugary sodas and birthday cakes with ice cream, Katie has always preferred potato chips and pretzels. So she has the taste buds of her Chinese mother.

Clio and Pep watch Xiao Lu eat. Like all Chinese, her head is down, the bowl is at her lips, and she shovels the mix of rice and stew into her mouth. She rarely looks up, and eats fast. The silence echoes with the slurps of the monks and nuns.

Pep tries not to look at the others eating, but from time to time in the cooling quiet he hears a sharp
crunch!
as a molar dispatches what at best is vegetable, at worst a lower life-form. He feels ill, and wolfs down his rice, as does Clio. Most of the monks and nuns eat slowly, chewing each bite carefully, clearly meditating on the food. Slowest of them all is the head monk. The others wait for him finish.

Suddenly he is done, and bows his head to his empty bowl. Through the windows high up under the curved eaves, rays of sunlight ride in, illuminating an army of hungry dust motes dancing their way down. In a movie, Pep thinks, the sunbeams would fall upon this last table of the dying Buddhists, but no. They miss badly—one falls upon a neglected white porcelain appliance near the kitchen with a mangle on top, another on the filthy, pitted stone floor.

A small bell rings again. The senior monk swivels around on the bench, hawks, and spits on the floor. A few other monks partake of the ritual spit.

Pep is appalled, thinking,
TB.
They all have TB in these places and there's no shot for it—Orville Rose told him that. The new strains are untreatable, lethal.

The head monk, using his umbrella as a cane, walks toward the door. He places each foot, in once-white tennis shoes, on the stone as if the earth below, all the way through to America, feels the weight of his soles. His umbrella taps stone in time. The other monks fall in behind. Pep is still worrying about the risk of TB.

“Hop betwixt the gobs!” he says to Katie and Clio. “Attend to the phlegm!”

On tiptoe Pep leads them out. The monks' feet crunch gravel as they follow the sinuous garden path, and they walk on through the falling night toward a small temple, and disappear within. Soon there is the sound of another frail bell, and chanting.

They stand there in the misty dusk. Pep shivers. The place seems even more ominous, lonely, and cold. The sun is gone. As if a warm coverlet has been pulled off, the bone chill of the mountain surrounds them, and seeps in. Pep opens his arms to Katie and Clio, who cuddle in and under for warmth.

“Let's organize where we sleep,” Clio says.

“I'll ask her,” Katie says. “Xiao Lu?” She nods. Katie puts her hands under her head in the universal sign of sleeping, and asks, “Where can we sleep?”

Xiao Lu gestures for them to follow, and brings them to an aged nun who sits in the doorway of a room on the ground floor of the dormitory building. “Venerable Mother,” she says, “this is my daughter Chun, whom I gave up ten years ago—”

“I know,” she says, in an irritated tone, “everyone knows already.”

“They need a place to sleep.”

“Think I don't know that? I'll do it, don't worry.”

Xiao Lu indicates that the nun will help, and that she will now say goodbye until morning. Pep indicates that they will escort her to the gate, and takes out his blue-laser flashlight and walks along with her, Clio and Katie following. He towers over her.
She's like a child—young enough to be our child. Katie our grandchild.

The monks are still chanting, more softly than before, and more discordantly. The glow of a humming spotlight drapes the white elephant. The blue-white beam of Pep's flashlight swings here and there, bringing stones and walls into eerie relief.

They come to the massive pink moon gate in the front wall. A gatekeeper opens it. Pep hesitates, wondering whether to give Xiao Lu the flashlight. It is an ink-black night, the clouds obscuring any wedge of moon. He offers it to her. She shakes her head no and points to a wooden pole as tall as her, leaning against the door. It has a black blob on top.

Pep thinks she wants him to get it for her, and goes and tries to pick it up. He doesn't realize how heavy it is, and it tilts over and falls to the ground. Laughing, Xiao Lu bends and easily picks it up in one hand.

All the Macys are surprised—this is one strong woman.

Xiao Lu takes a matchbook from the pocket of her orange vest, lights a match, puts it to the top of the pole—it's a pine-pitch torch, alight.

Suddenly to Pep the flame and the pine-and-mist scent in the thick night air are a comfort, reminding him of Macy family summers in the Adirondacks, all canoes on silky, cold lakes and campfires and toasted marshmallows. The pine torch in one hand, Xiao Lu waves goodbye and walks lightly off down the steps, and then turns sharply into the woods.

They watch for a long while. At first the pine torch bobs along smoothly on what looks like a wide path, but then it disappears up onto the black haunch of the mountain. As they watch, it starts to flicker as the trees block the flame. And then it seems to lose weight, or energy, and weakens. Pep sees it as an uncertainty, a wavering marker of one lone human soul going home in the dark of a fierce wilderness, filled with snakes.
An uncertainty of whether one heartbeat will follow, in a civilized way, the last.



In dim light filtering through a creaky wooden stairwell, the Macys—carrying quilts and cylindrical pillows filled with what Clio, from using similar
zafus
, is pretty sure are buckwheat shells—follow the nun slowly up three flights to a long, low room under the beams of the roof. Many narrow, wooden-framed beds are set out haphazardly. Dust is thick on the floor. Pep first, then Katie, starts sneezing. The nun turns on a bare bulb struggling at the end of a long wire. A dismal place, all cobwebs and mildew. At either end are two clouded windows.

“Yuck! Gross!” Katie says. “I can't sleep here.”

“It's here or outside, hon,” Clio says, swallowing her own revulsion at the filth. “We'll make the best of it and find a better place tomorrow. Come on—let's all pitch in and help—it'll be fun. Move the beds together.”

For Pep, even to
touch
the beds is a challenge. He watches them try to move the bulky, rough beds, and finally helps. The nun smiles at their difficulty. Finally the beds are side by side in the middle of the room, quilts and pillows on each. They have been given three threadbare orange towels, which they place on the pillows.

With a gesture that is universal, Clio asks where the toilet is. They follow her outside to a place behind the dormitory, a long latrine on the edge of a ravine.

“I'm never going there,” Katie proclaims. “I'll go in the woods!”

“Shay shay
,
” Clio says, feigning delight and bowing.

The nun smiles, says something, and walks away. They force themselves to manage. Pep gives thanks that he doesn't have to squat.

The beds are bad, hard and irrevocable. The quilts feel damp and moldy. The buckwheat shells are the only comfort, molding themselves to the three heads staring up in the dark. They cannot bring the beds close enough together to touch each other, and Katie suggests putting the mattresses on the floor. The sound of scurrying things stops them. Katie, clutching Shirty, climbs in with Clio, and barely fits.

Silence. Clio and Pep wait for the Nightly Comment From Katie.

“I told you, Mom, didn't I?”

“What's that, dear?”

“That she'd recognize me.”