Leaving Mother Lake (8 page)

Without saying anything, he leaned to one side and reached for his canvas bag. First of all he took out three tea bricks and then a large bag of rice — a type of sweet rice that did not grow around Lake Lugu, for which, no doubt, he’d had to barter very hard. The tea and rice were for my mother. For Zhema he had a pink shawl with big red-and-white flowers, and for Ache, a Tibetan belt, and for little Howei, a cone of brown sugar. But apparently there was nothing for me, because he now closed his bag and leaned it against the wall, and he settled himself near the fireplace to roll a leaf of tobacco.

My father lit his cigarette and blew a few rings.

I laughed. I knew there had to be something for me and that he was teasing me. And I was right. Zhemi laughed, too, and pushed his cigarette to the corner of his mouth and again reached for his knapsack. And then he handed me the shoes.

Red corduroy shoes with black dots and a black binding. With white rubber soles. And fluffy pink cotton lining. Pink, soft, fluffy cotton.

They were the most beautiful shoes I had ever seen. And they were the only shoes I’d ever owned.

As I stood with my shoes in my hands, rapt, speechless, my mother dragged a small chair near the cooking stove. She told me to sit, and as I stood rooted to the ground, she pushed me down gently onto the chair before she ladled warm water into the blue enamel bowl for me to wash my feet. As I had never worn shoes before, my feet were very cracked from running over icy mud and snow, and it was hard to scrub the dirt away, and when at last my feet were clean, my skin had turned unnaturally white and soft and wrinkled.

My Ama’s eyes misted over. “They’re just like your uncle’s feet,” she said.

Of course, I knew what she meant to say, that my feet were like Zhemi’s and that she so loved my father. And this was the sweetest thing my mother could have told me. These were the sweetest, the most loving words my mother was ever to say to me. To this day, when I recall my Ama saying this, about my feet being just like my father’s feet, my heart aches, and I wish I had not wasted a lifetime of tears in my first three years, when I cried not knowing why.

I put my feet inside the shoes and wiggled my toes and closed my eyes.

My feet, hot and soft from the foot bath, soaked in the soft warmth of the shoes. This was the most comforting, melting feeling. Well, for a while. Because my soles and my ankles were so cracked from the cold and so raw from all the scrubbing, they began to itch, and itch, and itch, and soon I could not stop scratching.

“Best to take them off,” my Ama said. “That way you won’t be itchy anymore, and you won’t get them dirty. You can save them for the New Year festival. Put them away and come and have your dinner.”

Now, the pork soup really did smell good, but I was so excited about my shoes, I could hardly eat anything. I barely swallowed a few mouthfuls before I ran out of the door, with my shoes in my hands, to show off to my friends. But Ama was right, I should not get the shoes dirty, and the little girls had to wash their hands before I let them touch them. And when they had squeezed their hands into my shoes and they had felt the warmth of the lining and they had put their noses to the white rubber soles, and we had agreed on who would get to borrow them and this time put them on their feet — after I had worn them at New Year — I went home to sleep.

That evening, and every night after it, when I climbed into bed, I put my shoes under the pillow. Then, as I curled up against Zhema, I fell asleep dreaming of the coming New Year, of chicken stew and thick slices of ham, and of the tap-tapping of my pretty little red shoes as I skipped onto the icy red earth, from courtyard to courtyard, and wished everyone a long and healthy life.

ONE MORNING I WOKEUP TO FIND
my mother busy sweeping the dirt in the courtyard. My mouth immediately began to water. My Ama was sweeping away the dirt of the old year so that we could welcome the new one, and that meant New Year was only six days from now. On the twenty-ninth of the month, my Ama would cut slices of salted pork, and she would prepare rice and the flat bread we call
baba.
On the thirtieth, she would kill a chicken and Dujema would bring us goat meat. Then, on New Year’s Eve, my Ama would invite the dog into the house for a human meal of rice and
baba
and vegetables and chicken and pork and goat. The dog would not waste his time with grateful tail wagging. While my Ama thanked him for giving us our human life, he would swallow and crunch and choke and crunch again, his stomach rapidly inflating like a blown-up pig bladder below his protruding ribs, then he would squash his muzzle into his empty metal plate and push it around the house until he finally settled in a corner with the plate between his front paws. And at last it would be our turn to sit near the fireplace and enjoy the feast.

Of course, there is a story about the Dog:

A long, long time ago, people and animals lived forever. But as eternity went on, there were more and more people and animals and less and less room for them to sleep and play, and less and less food for them to eat. So the animals and the people began to squabble and fight and eventually made so much noise that the Great Heaven could not stand it anymore.

The Great Heaven called all the animals together and told them that it had found a solution. From now on, aside from the goddesses and the gods, no one on the earth could live forever. Instead, every being was to have a mortal life, which meant that at the end of it, they would die. The Great Heaven, who did not want the responsibility of allocating life spans, had decided to call out a number of years and to leave it up to each animal to call back in response.

When the Great Heaven called one thousand years, the Wild Goose answered: “Yes! Me!” And when the Great Heaven called one hundred years, the Wild Duck answered: “Yes! Me!” And when the Great Heaven called out sixty years, the Dog said: “Yes!” But the Human Being was so slow and clumsy that it was left with only thirteen years.

Sorely disappointed at the prospect of such a short life, the Human Being went to complain to the Great Heaven. But the Great Heaven was not interested in complaints and suggested that the Human Being try to sort out its problems with the other animals. So the Human Being went pleading to all the animals, begging them to take its thirteen years in exchange for their own life span. Not surprisingly, no one was interested — until the Human Being asked the Dog, who agreed just because dogs have always loved people. But now the Human Being was so grateful that it promised to take care of the Dog forever. And this is why, every New Year’s Eve, dogs are given a full human meal, in remembrance of the Dog’s sacrifice.

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY
we went to pay the customary visits to our neighbors, to offer good wishes of health and longevity. Under her goatskin cape, my Ama was wearing her red vest and a bright multicolored sash around her waist. My sister wore her scarf, and I wore my brand-new red shoes.

I felt so proud.

As we walked from house to house, I could not take my eyes off my feet. When we sat by the fireplace, snacking and drinking, all I could see, all I could feel, were my feet in the pretty, cozy red shoes.

But then, as the day grew old and darkened, my pretty shoes began to change color. Every yard had been swept clean of last year’s dirt, but clean as the yards were, the red earth stained my soles. And everybody wanted to touch and feel how soft and how warm, and I could not pull back from all the hands blackened from the soot of the fires. When we came home late in the evening, the soles of my shoes were all brown, and the tops were streaked with black marks left by so many inquiring hands.

Everyone was very tired and full from too much food, and also quite drunk from all the Sulima wine, so they went straight to bed. But I did not want to go to sleep just yet — I was going to wear my shoes again the next day, and I wanted them to be clean and beautiful as new. I ladled some water into the enamel basin and washed and scrubbed my shoes until they were brand-new again, and I placed them against the fireplace to dry.

As I knew that would take some time, instead of going to bed with Zhema, I climbed up on the kang to sit in the warmth of the fire while I waited. But I was very tired, and before I knew it, I was asleep.

The smell of burning cotton woke me up.

I did not cry.

I just sat on my cracked heels and looked at the big ugly hole in my beautiful red shoe. The left shoe.

In the morning my Ama stuffed the lining with straw and patched the hole with black cotton, and when she was done, we set off to visit Lama Ruhi because, according to our custom, it is good luck to touch a lama’s head on New Year. So I wore my red shoes again, but now all I could see was the black patch. And when my friends came to try their feet in my shoes, that was all they saw as well. That ugly black patch. They laughed. “Silly girl!” they cried, and they ran home.

I threw the red shoes in the pigsty.

Sometime after New Year, my father came back to visit us, with some yak meat and yak sausages. When he saw my naked feet, he asked:

“Didn’t you like the shoes?”

“Don’t talk about the shoes,” my Ama said. “She’s been sad for too long.”

“They burned,” I answered.

My father said: “Don’t worry, I’ll bring you another pair.” But he never did.

For a while I tried my sister’s old green cotton shoes. Shoes badly worn at the heels and patched with bark and leaves, and much too big for me, which soon became hard and viscous from the damp and the cold. I threw those away as well, by the side of the mountain path, and after that I walked barefoot again.

Two Chicken Legs and a Starving Man

V
illage life, in general, is uneventful. Tradition spins the eternal return of the seasons according to well-known expectations and well-worn habits. Every generation follows in the footsteps of the previous one, the routine of everyday life broken only by calamity — a hailstorm, a drought, a plague of locusts, an earthquake. Or a revolution. Sometimes also, but much, much more rarely, the rules are broken by stubborn individuals. And then there may even be a scandal. Now, my Ama had broken the rules by setting up her own house in Zuosuo, and she had also broken her mother’s heart, but there had been no scandal. In the end, Grandmother had refused to fight and she had given in to my mother’s will. Grandmother was a very wise woman.

In fact, it is very hard to make a scandal among our people. We live close to one another but we don’t cultivate the stuff that makes for public outrage in other places. To begin with, Moso women are not sullied by sexual shame — for sex, as I have now discovered, is a much-favored source of disgrace in the world. But quite aside from this sexual freedom, which has proved so fascinating to revolutionaries, journalists, social scientists, public health officials, and in more recent years, international tourists, we Moso abide by rules of honor that forbid us the dubious pleasures of malicious gossip.

We must not speak ill of others or shout at people or discuss their private affairs. When we disapprove of someone, we must do so in halftones or use euphemisms or, at worst, mockery. Although we feel such passions, we must repress jealousy and envy, and we must always be prepared to ignore our differences for the sake of maintaining harmony. All this possibly sounds utopian, but it is absolutely true. In Moso eyes, no one is more ridiculous than a jealous lover, and short of committing a crime such as stealing, nothing is more dishonorable than a loud argument or a lack of generosity. So much so that nobody in Moso country today can recall either murder or beating or robbery, or a truly ugly fight between neighbors or jilted lovers. Under these circumstances, it should not be surprising that among us, people who develop bad tempers and fight with their own relatives are rare, although such was the fate the gods had intended for my mother’s family. But my mother had not made a scandal. No. Scandal was to be my special destiny. But more of this later.

Growing up in Zuosuo, I had a lot of freedom. We children could roam at our own will and visit from house to house and village to village without our mothers’ ever fearing for our safety. Every adult was responsible for every child, and every child in turn was respectful of every adult. Aside from dropping stones into the open bamboo pipes that brought running water into the village, there was little mischief for us to get into. There was nothing to break, nothing to steal, no one to insult — and if there was, we did not know it. We did not go to school but we were not idle. We could not read or write but we were not entirely uneducated. And while the boys played in the village streets and in the fields, waiting to turn into young men to begin learning from their uncles, we little girls already knew about work and responsibility. From the time we were perhaps five years old, we followed our mothers in the fields, our little baskets on our backs. Through example, our mothers provided us with all we needed to know.

My mother went in and out of the house like the wind. What I remember best about her was the swishing of her skirt. Her long skirt went
swish, swish
around her ankles — a black skirt on ordinary days and a white one on festival days. She was always working. Always busy. In and out of the fields. Sunflower fields, rice fields, cornfields. In and out of the house. Feeding the pigs and the chickens. And feeding us.

I must admit, I remember my mother’s skirt better than her face. But then again, I remember very little of my early childhood aside from the rumblings of my hungry stomach and a few events: Grandmother’s funeral and my red shoes — and the chicken legs and the starving man.

It happened when I was a little older, when I was already living with my uncle in the mountains. I had come home for a few weeks in autumn, when Uncle came to help with the house repairs and I helped with stripping the kernels from the ears of corn.

“Ama killed the big red rooster,” Zhema told us as we cored the yellow corn into a basket. “We’re eating chicken stew tonight.”