Leaving Mother Lake (5 page)

In the spring Dujema took care of my Ama when she gave birth to my older sister Zhema. Meanwhile, Numbu lived in his own mother’s house, with his grandmother and great-aunts and great-uncles, and aunts and uncles, and nephews and nieces — three generations all related through the female line. Following Moso custom, he visited my mother every night and sometimes even stayed for a few days to help out with some chores, but eventually he always went home to work for his own relatives.

Toward the end of summer in the following year, my mother did not see Numbu for a few weeks. He had left with the horsemen to accompany the caravan to the Tibetan town of Zhongdian. And there he had met a beautiful Tibetan woman, who had come home with him.

My mother had waited and waited for Numbu to come and visit her in the evening, but instead it was the Tibetan woman who came calling for her at the gates. Numbu had a new lover, the woman explained as well as she could in her broken Moso. As for herself, she had no family or friends in the village and she was lonely. Answering her in Tibetan, my mother invited the woman to sit around the fireplace and drink a cup of Sulima wine. That evening my Ama made a new friend and decided to forget about Numbu.

Some months after the Tibetan woman and my mother had become friends, Dujema introduced my mother to a handsome young man.

The man was really very beautiful. My Ama did not love him but she had only one thing on her mind: to raise her own family and have her own big house, with her own daughters and sons and grandchildren. When the man came knocking on her bedroom window in the evening, my Ama opened the door for him, but when, a few months later, she was certain that she was pregnant, she hung his bag on a nail outside her door — which, according to our custom, is the proper way for a woman to break off with a lover. When he visited that night, he understood that she did not want him to come and see her anymore, and he left.

My mother’s time came and the Tibetan woman helped her deliver my second sister, Dujelema. Then one day, when the Tibetan woman was holding the baby asleep in her arms, she suddenly burst into tears. She was missing her own family. The next morning she said good-bye to Numbu and went back to Zhongdian. I am not sure how Numbu felt, but my mother says that she missed her terribly.

Sometime toward the end of autumn, my Ama was putting out some corn to dry up on the roof of the house when she heard the bells of the horse caravan. As the riders got closer, she recognized one of her cousins from Qiansuo, and her heart leaped in her chest. She was always so happy to receive visitors from Qiansuo because they brought news and small gifts from her mother’s house. She waved and shouted to them:

“Hey! The sun is almost gone. You better come in.” And she climbed down the ladder and rushed to open the gates of her courtyard.

While the men unloaded the horses and took out the gifts that came from my grandmother, my Ama brought hay and water for the horses. And when the horses were watered and fed, the men sat on the ground and rested their weary backs against their knapsacks, leaving the youngest to do all the work: to light the campfire, take out the cooking utensils, cook their dinner, wash up, and tidy up. He was a tall and good-looking young man, and when my Ama came out again to offer the horsemen her best homemade wine, she made a point of pouring the young driver a full bowl. He smiled at her and took the bowl with both hands, with all the respect our custom requires. And that was when she saw that his were the most beautiful hands.

When the older men had stretched out their blankets and prepared to sleep near the campfire, Zhemi came inside the house. He played with my sisters and told my mother stories. And when later in the night the little girls fell asleep, he stayed up with my mother and they talked for a long time.

“Latso, why did you leave your mother’s house?” Zhemi asked. “It must be so hard to manage everything on your own. Why don’t you go home? You could come with us. If you wanted to, you could leave tomorrow.”

My Ama’s eyes filled with tears. Zhemi was right, life on her own was so hard.

“Come home with us, Latso. Don’t be so proud.”

But my Ama was proud. She dried her tears with the back of her hand and said, “I am going to show my mother that I can raise my own family.”

The next morning the caravan left without Zhemi.

He stayed for a few weeks. He helped my Ama repair the pigsty and gather a year’s worth of firewood and kindling for the winter nights. He was very quiet and very kind. When he was sure that everything was set up for winter, he went back to Qiansuo, and my mother sang softly in her empty house.

Zhemi came back in the spring, and again he stayed with my mother for some time. One morning my Ama woke earlier than usual, and when she sat near the hearth to drink her bowl of butter tea, she felt a familiar sickness in her stomach. She smiled. She loved Zhemi and she was going to have a son. She was going to raise her own big family.

Latso Comes Home

I
nstead of a son, my mother had me, the crying one, and when I was about three years old, sometime after my cousin Ache came to live with us,

she gave birth to my little brother, Howei. With two daughters and two sons, my mother’s family was beginning to look impressive.

Nevertheless, after Howei was born, Ama did not hang Zhemi’s things on the nail outside her door. She loved him dearly, and he continued to visit her, spending a few days with her every month. Whenever he visited, my mother washed and combed her long black hair, and she took out her cotton bedding to air and fluff up in the sunlight. In the evening she brought out the Sulima wine, and the house was filled with quiet joy. Sometimes Zhemi came alone. Other times he came with the caravan traders or with people from his own family. I especially remember his older sister. She was a tall woman with a kind and wide face. She loved to weave and she always carried a wooden spindle with her.

When my father stayed with us, our little brother, Howei, sometimes slept with Zhema and me in a bed in the storeroom, and sometimes he slept with Ache in the room above the stables. My father always slept in the alcove bed with my mother. Once, when Zhema was fast asleep, I sneaked out of bed and peeped through the crack between the planks in the wooden partition. In the glow of the fireplace, my mother’s skin shone like red gold and my father’s back glistened with sweat and he whispered sweet names to her and she called him by his horse’s name.

One day when my sister and I came home from cutting grass for pig feed, we found a tall black horse tied up in the courtyard. I could not wait to find out who the visitor was and rushed inside. No one we knew owned a black horse, and I immediately thought that Zhemi must have bought a new horse.

Inside the house, the fires were burning low and it was very dark. My mother was up on the kang, stirring the embers, her crouching figure outlined by the gray misty light that fell from the roof opening above the hearth. Near the kang, standing on the lower level, a man melted into the general darkness, barely visible against the sooty log walls, blackened by the smoke of the open fires we must never allow to die.

Zhema’s voice startled me: “Namu! Do you think people want to eat your pig food?”

As usual my big sister was right. I had been so curious about the black horse that I’d walked into the house with my little basket on my back. Just the same, I did not like to be told off and I pulled a nasty face.

Ignoring our bickering, Ama blew on the kindling. A bright orange flame lit up a deep scowl on her forehead, and my uncle’s tearful face emerged from the darkness. My mother then turned her worried forehead toward Zhema and said: “Grandmother is very sick. We have to go to Qiansuo tomorrow morning.”

The black stallion tied up in our yard had brought us very bad news.

My Ama had not been back to Qiansuo in many years, and she had a lot of things to prepare. Following our custom, she had to bring a gift for every member of her family as well as for every family in Grandmother’s village: brick tea, sugar, wine. While my sister helped her with the gifts, Ama sent me next door to Dujema to borrow a horse. I was hungry and tired from gathering pig feed and wished Ache had gone instead of me, but he was not home yet, and my mother’s voice was harsh and flat. So I did not argue, and after I had closed Dujema’s horse in our stable, I kept out of the way.

Very early next morning, while we were still sleeping, Uncle loaded the horses with the gifts and saddled Dujema’s pony for us to take turns at riding. My brother, Howei, was still a toddler and he needed to be carried. As for me, although I could walk, I was much too young to hike all the way to Grandmother’s village.

As soon as we’d had our breakfast, we set off on the road with our little mountain horses trotting like obedient dogs behind the big black horse. My Ama set the pace and we followed — across the village fields in the valley and then up the hill and into the oak forest, and yet higher up the mountain and into the pine forest, leaving the blue immensity of Lake Lugu shimmering behind us. We pressed on behind Ama, in the wake of her long skirt swishing about her ankles and trailing the red dirt. When the path was wide enough, we walked alongside the horses; when it narrowed, we walked behind them. At times the trail turned to sludge but this hardly slowed us down. When we slipped, we just picked ourselves up, shook the mud from our backsides, and walked on, without talking, without even thinking that we needed to pee or that we were hungry. Ache and I took turns riding Dujema’s pony and running beside it. Uncle, Ama, and Zhema took turns carrying little Howei.

Our collective breathing and the dull thudding of the horses’ hooves on the ancient forest floor barely ruffled the anxious silence that enveloped us. We slowed down only where the trail narrowed dangerously on the edge of precipices. We stopped only at the crossroads marked by the piles of rocks we call
mani
piles because of the rocks engraved with the mantra
Om mani padme hum
, where Ama and Uncle lit sagebrush in offering to the mountain spirits. Only then did we take the time to listen to the rustling of the pines, to look up at the eagle spanning its wings in the cloudless sky, or to look down at the river churning yellow water, a long way below us, between white sandy banks and the sheer gray walls of deep gorges.

At night we stayed with relatives, and Ache and I ate our dinner listening to the adults talking in grave tones. And when the adults were done with talking and eating and smoking and drinking wine, we huddled together near the fire-place for what seemed a very short night. We woke up for breakfast and then we resumed our walk in the pink glow of dawn.

On the third day the sun was already high in the sky when we reached the turnoff where Grandmother’s house comes into view, and my Ama suddenly gave a loud cry and I looked on in terror as she ran down the path, ripping her headdress and tearing at her long black hair.

“Ama!” I screamed.

“It’s too late,” my sister said. “It’s too late. She’s dead.” “Who’s dead? Who’s dead?” I cried.

Zhema pointed to the white flag floating over the roof of Grandmother’s house.

Then we ran too. We ran after Ama, with Uncle carrying Howei on his back and the horses following after us. We ran until we reached the entrance of the village, when we had to slow our pace and compose ourselves and walk with the rest of the people who were going to Grandmother’s house. At the gates the villagers moved to one side and let us pass ahead of them. “Latso has come back,” I heard someone say as I stepped through the gates and into the courtyard.

People were milling about between long banquet tables, coming in and out of the house, talking and sobbing. Two women I had never seen before were tidying up the leftovers from lunch, their long skirts brushing the dirt between the tables. At the front door, my mother was standing with Aunt Yufang. She seemed calm now, but she looked strange with her hair loose about her face. Aunt Yufang looked even stranger. She had plaited her long hair into a single braid and her head was covered with clay. Her face was gray and sooty. Aunt Yufang looked so strange that in spite of the still half-filled dishes on the tables, I forgot I had not eaten since very early that morning.

I grabbed my sister’s hand. “I’m scared!”

“Why?”

“Did Aunt Yufang die too?” I asked.

“Of course not! What’s wrong with you?”

“She looks like a ghost,” I continued in a low voice. “People always look like that when someone dies,” Zhema said and she squeezed my hand to reassure me. “Anyhow, how do you know what a ghost looks like? Come, let’s go into the house.”

We followed Ama and Aunt Yufang inside. In spite of the pine torches and the fires burning in the hearths, the room was obscured by the thick smoke of smoldering sagebrush and cypress leaves and by the sheer number of people. The smoke stung my nose and made my eyes water. The people made me dizzy. I had never seen so many people gathered together in one house. They were everywhere, men and women, standing near the kang and blocking the light of the fire god, others squatting near the cooking stove, chatting and drinking tea and wine — and in the half-light of the fires and the haze, they were but shadows of men and women. Shadows with sad, unknown faces.

Zhema pointed to three men squatting on the floor next to a cane basket who were cutting up strips of white cloth with scissors.

“They’re Great-Uncle’s helpers,” my sister said.

“Why does Great-Uncle need help?”

“They’re going to bathe Grandmother.”

“Isn’t it wrong for a man to wash a woman?” I whispered. “It’s not wrong when the woman is dead,” Zhema said. As I took in this bewildering piece of information, the shadows parted and my mother kowtowed to the old Daba sitting on the kang, near the hearth. He was wearing a white cape and a brightly colored crown and chanting to himself, his lips barely moving in his wrinkled old face. And since all I knew of Dabas was that they cured sick people, the old man was a comforting sight.