Xinran Xue - Sky Burial, An Epic Love Story of Tibet

One night, just as daylight was breaking, Wen decided to brace herself against the gale and go outside the tent to relieve herself. When she tiptoed back past the sleeping family, she was amazed to see Saierbao under the quilt with Ge’er, their arms wrapped around each other. She stood there for some time, unable to move, watching them sleep.

Since coming to live with Gela’s family, Wen had slowly gotten used to sharing a common bed with all of them, male and female. She couldn’t imagine how husbands and wives conducted their sex lives in full view of all, but she knew a great many races had lived like this for centuries. It had never occurred to her that the calm, dignified Saierbao would have an affair with another man right under her own husband’s nose. Just to live with your own husband, she wanted to shout to Saierbao, is the most precious, wonderful thing in the world. She didn’t, of course, but nor was she able to go back to sleep.

The next day, Wen remained troubled by her discovery. She didn’t know how to look Saierbao and Ge’er in the face and tried to avoid them. Everyone noticed there was something wrong with Wen, but assumed that she was homesick. Ni kept dragging Zhuoma over to try to persuade Wen to tell her what was wrong, but Wen just went red and they couldn’t get any sense out of her. Zhuoma knew that Wen often stared into space during the day and wept at night, so she assumed Wen’s distractedness must be due to missing Kejun and was afraid to risk asking clumsy questions.

After a few days, Wen’s sense of embarrassment had faded a little. When she observed Saierbao and Ge’er together, she could see that the two of them acted as if nothing was going on. She very much wanted to find out whether they were really in love or whether their coupling was just a physical urge, but she was ashamed of her own nosiness. Still, however she looked at it, Saierbao no longer seemed such a paragon. For Gela-a man whose wife was being stolen from under his nose-she felt pity; for Ge’er-a man who was living under his brother’s roof but flouted the most basic moral rules-disgust.

One day, the family’s fifth child, Me, approached the camp on horseback in the company of a group of lamas from his monastery. He was on a trip to collect colored stone from the mountains, which could be ground into pigment for religious paintings. He had heard from neighboring nomads that the family was nearby. When he saw Saierbao and Ge’er he galloped toward them shouting, “Mother, Father.” Since Gela was working away from the tent that day, Wen thought she must have misheard the form of address Me used. Her Tibetan was still limited to a few basic words. But Zhuoma, who had taken over churning the butter from Saierbao, said with a sigh, “Me must miss his mother and father. All children who leave home for the monastery get homesick.”

“Yes. Such a pity his father’s not here,” Wen added sympathetically.

“Oh,” said Zhuoma smiling, “that doesn’t matter. For Tibetan children any of their fathers will do.”

“What do you mean?” asked Wen, surprised. “Zhuoma, do you mean to say Gela and Ge’er are…” Wen stopped Zhuoma from turning the wooden pole.

Zhuoma was astonished by Wen’s confusion until suddenly it dawned on her. “Didn’t you know that Gela and Ge’er are both married to Saierbao?”

Now Wen was even more bewildered. “Saierbao has two husbands?”

“Yes, this is Tibet. In Tibet a wife can have several husbands. You never asked me about it so I thought you’d worked it all out from hearing the children call to them.”

Zhuoma passed the butter pole to Ni, who was standing nearby, entranced by their talking to each other in Chinese, and pulled Wen to one side.

“I understand how difficult it is. For you, living here is just like being in Beijing was for me. If I hadn’t visited China, I would still think the whole world lived on a snowy, mountainous plateau.”

Now that she understood Saierbao’s “adultery,” Wen was ashamed of her own ignorance and misjudgment. She didn’t tell Zhuoma that what she had seen a few nights ago had been the cause of her low spirits.

Wen was disappointed to find that Me and his fellow lamas knew nothing of the conflict between the Chinese and Tibetans and had not seen a single Chinese soldier. Just before they departed, Wen asked Zhuoma if Me might be persuaded to part with two small pieces of colored stone. That evening, she used one of the stones to write a letter to Kejun on the back of his photograph.

Dearest Jun,

Are you all right? I just want to write one

word. Sorry. Sorry to you because I haven’t

found you yet. Sorry to myself, because I

can’t search the plateau on my own. Sorry

to Zhuoma and this Tibetan family,

because I have no way of repaying them.

The color from the stone pencil was very faint but the stone made such a deep indentation that her words were engraved on Kejun’s smiling face. She remembered the diary and pen that Wang Liang had given her in Zhengzhou and that were now buried, along with her pack, somewhere in a mountain pass. “Writing can be a source of strength,” Wang Liang had said. She felt that her short message to Kejun had given her fresh courage to face the difficulties ahead.

Me’s brief visit to the tent made Wen reflect on what life was like for Tibetan children. It must have been very hard for him to leave the family at such a young age, she thought, and Saierbao must feel his absence deeply.

Zhuoma told her not to worry.

“The Tibetans let children go very easily,” she said. “All of Tibet is like one enormous monastery. Every household with more than two sons has to send at least one to the monastery to become a lama. This shows their religious devotion, but it also gives the child an education and relieves the economic burden on the family. There is a Tibetan saying: ‘Yak butter is a more lasting possession than a son.’ This is because a yak belongs to a family alone, but a son can easily be taken away to a monastery.”

Were Tibetan children allowed any kind of childhood at all, Wen wondered. She noticed that, except for clothes and hats, hardly a single item in Gela’s household was made especially for children. She asked Zhuoma to question Ni about what it had been like when she was smaller. Had she ever had toys?

“Yes,” Ni replied. Her father, Gela, had made her lots of toys out of grass and dried goats’ tails, but whenever they moved on they had to be left behind. He had also carved them wooden animals as birthday presents.

The oldest son, Om, was no longer a child. He must have been about eighteen and spent the day silently working away with Gela and Ge’er. He couldn’t read but he played the Tibetan lute beautifully and sang well. Every day at dusk, the time when all the family dealt with little bits of personal business, like removing lice from their robes and hair, washing themselves, or laying out their bedding, Wen would hear him singing outside the tent. She never knew what he was singing about, since it was all but impossible for her to communicate with Om, but she could sense a man’s outpouring of feeling for a woman. Om’s singing always brought out her longing for Kejun, as if the sound waves could shake him out of hiding. Wen had no idea how an eighteen-year-old boy raised in such isolation could create such resonant melodies.

The oldest daughter, Ni, had just reached puberty and was the most animated member of the family. She was like a merry little bell, able to make her usually taciturn parents rock with laughter. But Ni always cried secretly at night. At first, Wen thought Ni was having nightmares. When she tried nudging her awake, however, she found that Ni wasn’t asleep. Wen didn’t understand how the girl sleeping next to her could be so different by day and at night. She could see a kind of despair in Ni’s tearful eyes. Wen avoided thinking about this. She herself was trying to hold off despair and refused to succumb to it even when, in her worst nightmares, she saw a blood-soaked Kejun. Wen wondered what had left this lovely, flowerlike girl so bereft of hope.