Resistance (6 page)

I might have lain there, I knew, peeling back the layers of silence around me, until I heard the rustling and voices of animals that had lived in this place long ago, until I heard water coursing in the dry creek nearby; but I chose the opposite way. I allowed myself to feel that I had been slighted. Despite my sincerity and concentration, I had not been given anything remarkable this day to work with, no even tenuous sign to lead me on. Why not a feather, falling from a passing bird, which I would have run to catch? Or the appearance of a wolf, longer gone in this country than the grizzly? But the day had produced nothing, not even a striking stone I wanted to pocket.

Rankled, and now fully awake, I consoled myself with the thought that I had made, against the cold distance of my father and the early, violent death of my mother, a good life. I had a family coming, my work was just, and it was exactly the right work for me. I’d chosen all this deliberately, knowing the scope of my life and work would be small, but believing it would be authentic.

Where could I go from this place, then? At twenty-nine I continued to experience what I once named the Great Burden, the weird combination of oppression and challenge which grows out of knowing the incompetence of the powerful. And I believed in the possibility of work that had to be done in every corner of the world because of it. Friends in Basra and Riyadh, people I had gone to law school with, had sent me newspaper clippings about our country’s empire building in Saudia Arabia and Kuwait, strategies that would one day come to a head in the oil wars. I’d grown up reading about Minamata disease, part of heavy industry’s collateral damage. I’d grown up furious about François Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes and the assassination of Juan Domingo Perón, and the killing fields of Stroessner, Pol Pot, and Suharto. The corruption of the Marcoses was a fresh memory, along with the dead of Bhopal. Against this blight I’d read biographies of Cardinal József Mindszenty and Gandhi and the South African poet Steve Biko and the Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet.

Strictly speaking, these horrors, through which people like Idi Amin and the Shah of Iran moved, Cuba’s Batista, Pablo Escobar’s thugs, and the likes of the Contras, with their allies in banking and business, their murderous ideologies, their paranoia and hatreds, were not my affair. I was an angry bystander. I’d no power to intervene, and had no intention of dropping the work I was already committed to, not in order to raise someone else’s awareness, promote greater indignation, or organize opposition. Besides, as soon as I pointed my finger at someone I knew I would flinch at the summariness of my accusation. I trusted no one with an assassination list. If I had learned one thing in the courtroom it was that corruption is never tidy. And that of all the crimes that harm society, aiding and abetting is the most insidious, the hardest to prosecute because it is so amorphous.

The world’s afflictions I still consider intractable. And who, among those we might agree were the true merchants of death, who among them, really, would ever say they had been wrong and desist, go pick up the water bucket and soap, offer no defense of their acts, just go for the bulldozer, the fire extinguisher, whatever was required?

I still keep in touch with old friends from college with whom I once passionately discussed these ideas, as if our task remained realistic and definable. We have skills, we tell each other now, we’ve opportunity, we’re reasonably well informed. We share strenuous objections to the way business and government have converged to reorganize society. Our solution so far has been to teach and apprentice, to convene opposing sides for discussion, and to circulate what government, business, and the militant religions have suppressed.

None among my friends has turned his back on the ideals of justice, which seemed so much more plausible when we were young. We’ve not lost faith; but for some the years have been very discouraging. Many of us can’t see beyond the boundaries of our own difficulties. We’re like a tribe of naked people caught suddenly in a freezing climate, men and women gathered in some sheltered hollow who have located a fire, and now spend their time in forays over a barren land scrounging for wood.

Beyond writing my briefs and arguing my cases, beyond reinforcing my friends’ plans and lifting their hopes, I don’t know what I am to do. What keeps me from giving up is seeing some young woman pull over to drag a dead animal off the road. Or meeting a reporter, as I just have, who has seen in the streets of Calcutta hundreds of the untended dead, curled up like leaves, who’s interviewed the sleepwalking miners of Rondônia, the warlords of Somalia, the mujahideen, the president of the World Bank, and then sits without comment while her father complains about the price of gasoline.

What holds me is the faith of the others. What has troubled me is the exhaustion that overtakes me, the way I want no longer to be responsible.

In the morning I could again recall no dream.

Virgil was sitting in the cottonwoods when I spotted him, and birds flew from the cover of their leaves as I approached. He had half a smile. I gave him a weighted nod, as if I had something important to say, despite my too-brief stay up the creek; but we saddled our horses without saying anything.

The plains grizzly I’d seen that night on the Hi-Line, the image of it, had been heavy on my mind as I walked back down the creek. It could easily have come up off the Fort Belknap Reservation. I asked Virgil whether he thought it was likely that a rare animal like that might be safer on Indian land. Some Indians, I knew, making their own difficult transition from that culture to this, were as likely to kill the bear as any wide-eyed white boy.

“The difference between us is that what you are able to forget will not leave us alone,” said Virgil. He was answering a deeper question, and I assumed he was including the bear in his “we.” His tone was as close as he ever came to exasperation.

He’d seen a few plains grizzly in his life, Virgil said after a bit, one over around Boxelder Coulee and another in the Smoke Creek drainage. Both these places are on the Fort Peck Reservation.

“They’re around,” he said. “Everything, even the buffalo, is still around. You get to believing they’re hunted out or starved out, or maybe they’ve run off, but as long as people are telling stories about them, as long as people keep them in their minds, they’ll stay around. You have to keep telling the stories, though, calling up the memory of them. They come back in your dreams at night. They come along when you’re off somewhere, walking by yourself. They’re asking you why. That’s their question. Why.”

“My question,” I tried, “would be, Why did you bring me here again?”

He didn’t answer.

“I failed the first time, I failed this time.”

He ignored me.

“You know what it is, Virgil? I’m a man thinking all the time. I’m a thinker. I never really stop, so most of the time whatever you’re trying to teach me or show me, it can’t get in.”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t be like you, Virgil.”

“No, you can’t. But you can answer the bear’s question.” He pulled his horse around to face me. “The bear is coming to you because you say you want to help, and it’s you he’s asking why. He’s speaking for all of them out there, every animal. Why are you trying to kill me?”

“It’s not me.”

“You need to stop hearing your own name, Edward, whenever someone speaks.”

When we got back to the truck we grained and watered the horses. After we closed up the trailer Virgil turned to me. I could see he was anxious, but his voice was so even he could have been reading a grocery list.

“That little place up there, the divide between the creeks, seems empty of spirit to you, but it isn’t. You’re afraid. One day I hope you go back. Maybe something will be waiting for you.”

“I’m doing the best I can, Virgil.”

“The bear’s holding the door open, Edward. A very patient animal.”

On the way back to his place, Virgil pulled over to look close where coyote tracks crossed the road.

“See here,” he said, “how the front feet are digging in? He’s carrying something.”

I agreed.

“Looks like he crossed last night.”

“Yeah.” He scanned the whole of the bare blue sky, from the horizon in the east to the one in the west, before he got back in the truck.

It would be another six years before I went back up on Porcupine Creek. By then, Jill and I had two children and Virgil was in his last days in a hospital in Great Falls. I stayed in my same camp above the dry creek bed, until the voices that had so long debated the future within me grew silent, and I stepped through the door.

Edward Larmirande, member, Métis
Nation Council, attorney, author,
The Numinous Experience and the
Suicide Meriwether Lewis,
on leaving
Winnipeg, Manitoba

The Walls at Yogpar

I was a compulsive student as an undergraduate. After completing my studies in Mandarin Chinese I went straight to graduate school, wanting to obtain a broad-based knowledge of—if not actual fluency in—the many other languages spoken in China, a nation oceanic in its geographical and historical reach. During those years of completely devoted study—with the Tai languages of the Southeast, the Tibeto-Burman languages of the Southwest, the Turkic languages of the Northwest, and the Mongol languages of the Northeast—I experienced bouts of disassociation and a feeling like seasickness. I could not make sense of even an advertisement on the side of a bus. But I also knew moments of vast, almost chilling comprehension, when I could easily grasp one concept—“family,” let us say—as it was imagined in eleven different languages.

Within the boundaries of the politically defined nation of “China,” eighteen languages are spoken by at least 500,000 people each; another thirty-seven are spoken by lesser numbers, including Lahu (270,000), She (330,000), Uzbek (7,500), and Xibe (44,000). No one language is enough. No one can speak for all. Further, across these many borders of expression—Naxi or Salar or Dong— most cannot make themselves understood. Each of these tongues seeks to corral some bit of the fundamentally incomprehensible nature of the world— shadings of smell in the forest as they might be known to a dog, the intention behind a stranger’s gesture, the origin of any single thing, the reason the heart breaks.

It is wondrous but also frightening to consider.

At the age of thirty I realized that without meaning to, I had decided against taking a permanent companion. Such a person, I thought, might too easily slow me down or misdirect my efforts. I couldn’t allow myself to stop learning.

After graduate school, as I internalized more of the meaning of Chinese languages—I was fluent now in eight—I felt not only an acute appetite for unrestricted movement but a desire for unbounded physical space, an open geography. With yet another loan from my parents I moved out of my very cramped quarters in Shanghai and traveled west by train and bus, aiming for the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, the country of Uygur and Kasak tribespeople. Given the usual mechanical breakdowns and bureaucratic interruptions, it took ten days to cross Henan, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces. I learned to accommodate the delays, but they intensified the anxiety I felt about the fate of my books and notes, which I had shipped ahead. I often recalled the story of the
Homo erectus
fossils from Zhoukoudian Cave near Beijing, the original evidence for Peking man, all of which disappeared in a transfer between trains during World War II, never to be found.

When we finally reached the high tableland of Xinjiang, I did feel a physical relief. Here was a region larger than Alaska, bounded by great mountain ranges on three sides, with the Takla Makan, a desert as big as New Mexico, at its center. I was eager to take up my life again in this far outland, with no clear idea of what I would do. I was basically a gifted juggler of Sino-Tibetan languages. In periodic states of delirium, I believed I could actually speak the unspeakable, know the unknowable. In more practical moments I knew I was bound for employment in Urumchi, the capital city of half a million, set in the foothills of the central mountain range of the region, the Tian Shan. I could teach Mandarin Chinese to these subjects of China and translate English technical manuals into local Uygur. In a matter of months, I believed, I could learn the other local tongue, Kasak.

In some way, I would prove useful.

Shanghai, during my years there, was much more open to the West than Urumchi was or had ever been. Urumchi had been a crossroads for Turkish, Mongol, and Tibetan traders for probably two thousand years and for other overlanders nearly as long. I was a late arrival, emblematic of the modern era, coming at a time when the city was shifting from horses and camels to assembly lines and department stores. Urumchi, though, was not as provincial as I’d initially assumed; rippling beneath the coarse bedsheets of ordinary life here, rural enough, were the strong countercurrents of its original tenants, that always fascinating and odd acumen of a truly foreign people.

I easily found work teaching at the university, also work as a translator. After settling into these routines, and an apartment, I began to tease apart the convolutions of life around me in the streets, in the newspapers, in the university, and in the manufacturing culture. I pried open life in Urumchi with confidence and ordered it, using Mandarin, Uygur, and Manchu, a language I fell into more naturally than I did Kasak (though I would eventually become fluent in that Turkic tongue).

Being able to speak so many languages well made me, very obviously, a queer fish, even a sort of trickster figure (not to mention being Caucasian, and a woman from the West). I quickly became irritable from being stared at too long and then being called after in inappropriate ways. I missed the civility of Shanghai, where I blended in better. I tried to remind myself, of course, that I had opted for the frontier, that I just needed to develop that famous second skin, a way of knowing the world that was in keeping with speaking Manchu, Uygur, and Kasak.

My irritation at not being deferred to when it was appropriate, with not being respected, encouraged fleeting thoughts of self-doubt, which were never really far off anyway, a sense that, beyond my erudition, I had no purpose. My learning did not automatically send a signal here about the wisdom I thought I possessed. Instead it stood for self-importance, and for some probably it signaled madness. Confronted like this, I worked to keep at bay the familiar enemies of my equilibrium: loneliness, the fear that I was undesirable, the suspicion that, like a wind-up toy’s, my performance would just end and people would leave.

I continued to teach language and literature, but after five months let go the translation, which had become tedious. I’d been doing most of it for local industrial concerns—oil refineries, cement plants, mining operations. Moreover, as I saw it, I was only reinforcing my employers’ weirdly distorted passion for growth and material wealth. Their devotion to increased production was aggressive and humorless, menacing almost. Worker safety, pollution control, maternity leave—all this was a nuisance to them, a series of impediments to production. What was wrong with me, they asked, that I didn’t work more hours? Where was my loyalty? Had I no pride?

For my employers, work had replaced the family as the locus of identity. They affected an air of tolerance with me, backward as I seemed to be, and ticked off the lists of things they had bought their families, which families were now superior to other men’s.

This singular quest for expansion and personal material gain seemed a grotesque fit with general Urumchi culture outside the university and the factories. Every neighborhood was a different bolt of cloth—another color, another pattern, another weave. Tribally mixed as it was, however, and had been for centuries, life in Urumchi appeared to me everywhere a frugal (as opposed to impoverished), small-scale existence, from people’s house gardens to their shops. Employment was an occasional necessity, not a defining activity.

The striving for more barrels of oil, new lodes of ore in the mountains, more deep reservoirs of water was wreaking environmental havoc in the region. It did not take me long to understand that, despite its long history as a pastoral country, northern Xinjiang Region had come to be regarded by its absentee Chinese landlords as a wasteland. As such, it was deemed best suited to mineral extraction, to gargantuan irrigation projects, and to military experiments with pathogens and poisons. It was here in dry lake depressions in the Takla Makan that the Beijing government chose to conduct nuclear weapons tests. What happened to the people of the region, to what they were attached to or aspired to be, was of no more importance to the Chinese in Beijing than it was to the local managers of the chemical plants and oil refineries.

In order to keep myself busy after I dropped the translation work, I hosted small lunches for women with traditional Turkic and Mongol backgrounds and recorded and translated their stories. They were usually older women I met on my daily walks, people I chose because they were matriarchs or had come to the city from far away, had never married, or were otherwise interesting to me. I also began compiling dictionaries, with the help of some sophisticated databases I had helped develop while I was in Shanghai. I did one of the Manchu dialect spoken by local Xibe people, an ethnic group moved in from Manchuria to act as border guards after the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644. Also a dictionary of Urumchi street slang, and another of the Mandarin Chinese spoken in northern Xinjiang, a dialect heavily influenced by the Muslim backgrounds of the Uygurs and Kasaks.

It was an antic life. Some evenings, moving slowly around the workroom in my apartment, making entries at three different workstations, I saw it as a life of ten thousand desperate distractions, no matter how calm and tidy my surfaces appeared.

Korbel Uklel lived directly below me on the second floor. It took a while to figure out what he did because he’d be gone for weeks at a time. He was a camel trader, a Kirghiz born in Kashgar. His wife and both his children had been killed in a bus accident on their way to Tashkent. One night, when we were doing laundry together in the basement, he told me he had no feelings anymore for family life. He would not marry again.

I saw Korbel casually every few weeks, but I began to look ahead to our talks. His Uygur was excellent, and for once in my life I did not treat a new friend like an informant. I didn’t, in this instance, ask him to help me with his Kirghiz. So we spoke Uygur. He never pried into my life or made any even remotely inappropriate comment or effort to embrace or otherwise touch me, though I began to long for it. He took me with him once to sell camels in the market. The trappings of caravans, all the worn and antiquated equipment lying about, the smell and heat of the animals and the working demeanor of the men, stimulated me in an unfamiliar way.

I began to daydream about traveling with Korbel.

It was a ridiculous idea, I would tell myself, but I held to it tightly, and one night it took an unexpected shape. I’d chanced on a book called
Tracks
by an Australian woman named Robyn Davidson, about her crossing half that continent alone on a camel. Turning the pages and gazing at the photographs, I pictured myself in her poses, her clothing.

I wanted to cross the Takla Makan with Korbel.

The next time we met I put it to him. We were having dinner in a restaurant. (I always had the feeling when I made my bold suggestions about dinner or a movie that I was testing the limits of Korbel’s Muslim faith.) He froze with the fork halfway to his mouth. Clearly it was not something he had ever considered. He was gracious about it, though. He said he would think about it, and that was the end of that part of the conversation.

My classes at Xinjiang University were full of culturally complicated young men and women, many of them from Chinese-Uygur families or Mongol-Russian families, or other mixes equally strange. Even as I taught I could feel the traditional lines separating the languages I used in the classroom beginning to break down, as more and more workers came in with their families from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, even Kashmir. The compartmentalization of concepts I employed in organizing my dictionaries began to tremble ever so slightly in the face of these collisions and couplings. My students were streaming toward a metalanguage. I feared it might one day leave me behind.

I once read a technical paper in which the author essayed that the well-watered grasslands of northern Xinjiang, at the bases of the snow-capped Tian Shan, had been an important home to some of the earliest members of
Homo sapiens,
people who swept north tens of thousands of years ago from more temperate climes, once they had the means for making fire, clothing, shelter, and weapons. In the little traveling I’d done beyond Urumchi—west along the foot of the Borohoro Range, three hundred miles out to Bole; east from Urumchi, taking the loop road through Qitai, Qijiaojing, and Turpan, around the base of the Bogda Range—I’d found a bone-deep peace. I’d felt, strolling those grasslands, as if I’d been absolved of every error, as if the self-imposed demand to achieve had for those hours been silenced. Such relief can only come, I think, from contact with the residue, the local spirits, of ancestral humanity.

I had read some history of the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, a countryside invaded and occupied over the course of many centuries by Arabs, Mongols, Tibetans, Huns, and recently the Chinese. After the tenth century, the region came to represent part of the great middle stretch of the Silk Road; in this way it began to play a crucial role in medieval European politics and commerce. But even as I read the fascinating particulars of these histories—the battles, the rise and eclipse of a Mongol dynasty, the midwifery of one or another technology like printing or gunpowder—it was this lone, almost stray fact—an early home for
Homo
sapiens—
that stayed with me.