Ma Jian - Red Dust

The stench of dung smoke is so strong I can only take shallow breaths. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I look around the room. It is as simply furnished as most Tibetan homes, with whitewashed walls and wooden chests. Next to the front door is an opening into a dark chamber — Myima’s bedroom, or the larder perhaps. Opposite the fireplace is a traditional Tibetan cabinet, a scroll painting of the wrathful Yama, Lord of Death, clasping a Wheel of Life, and a table draped with white prayer scarves.

The men eye me and nod. They are probably discussing my request to attend the sky burial tomorrow.

The soldier stands up and beckons me to follow him. He leads me to the dark chamber and shines his torch on a hemp sack that is tied at the top with telephone wire and stands on a platform of mud bricks.

‘That’s her,’ he says.

I flash my torch on the sack. She appears to be sitting upright, facing the wall, head bowed low. Perhaps they had to push it down before they could tie up the sack.

Back in the soldier’s hut, I lie on the bed, eyes wide open, thinking about Myima.

The living and the dead can only meet in the mind. I imagine her singing, like the Tibetan women I have heard in the hills, and in the backs of open trucks. I picture her bending over the fields, her long braids slipping over her ears. I give her the face of a girl I saw on a bus: large red cheeks, small nose, dark-rimmed eyes, round bosom. A bent paper clip holds her shirt together where the second button has come off. The dark dip inside trembles with each shake of the bus.

The soldier walks in from his nightly inspection of the telephone line. His face is blank. He lights a cigarette and lies down beside me.

Eventually he speaks. ‘You’ll be gone in a few days, so I might as well tell you. Besides, I can’t keep this to myself much longer, the pain is too much.’ I lift my pillow and sit up.

‘Myima and I were very close, that is what kept me here so long. Most people would have applied for a transfer years ago. I first met her on that hill up there. I was walking to the hill behind to change a telephone wire. She had let her sheep out and was sitting on the grass. On the way back I was carrying a large roll of wire, it weighed a ton. I said hello and sat down beside her to rest. It was a hot afternoon. I was sweating even in my vest. She watched her sheep grazing in the breeze, then turned and stared at me straight in the eye. No woman had looked at me like that before.’

I remember the girl in the red blouse I saw in Maqu. She too stared at me like that before she escaped to the banks of the Yellow River.

‘I told her I worked in the repair station. She didn’t understand Chinese, and my Tibetan was still very poor, so I traced my finger along the telephone line to my house at the bottom. She laughed and turned her face to the Kamba Pass. She said she had seen me before, and asked why I had stayed here so long. Before I left her that afternoon, I cut her a long piece of wire and said she could use it to hang out her laundry or to tie things up with.’

‘After that, we met quite often on the hill. She was the one who taught me Tibetan. .

‘Last year, at about this time of night, she came to my room and sneaked into my bed. She had never slept here before. . She was the first woman I ever touched. In the morning she pushed me away and said she had to go home. Before she went, she took off the necklace she had worn since she was a child and put it under my pillow. The next day I heard she was getting married to Dawa and Dorje. If the army ever hear about this, I’m finished.’

I nod my head. ‘Sleeping around on military service — they could lock you up for that.’

He pulls the necklace from a drawer filled with batteries and pencils. I study it under the lamp. It is a string of agate and wooden beads with a large turquoise in the middle. The stone is smooth and shiny, and still carries the milky smell of a woman’s skin. My mind flashes back to the hemp sack on the platform of mud bricks.

‘Did she visit you after that?’ I want to say I will not to go to the burial tomorrow, but the words do not come out.

‘I don’t want to tell you everything.’ He pulls the army coat over his face and rolls onto his side. I toss my stub on the floor, turn the light off and close my eyes. . I sent my copy of Leaves of Grass to Ai Xin in Wushan and she wrote back from Beijing saying she was studying at Lu Xun School of Literature. At the end of the letter she wrote, ‘I have a boyfriend now. A painter. He says he knows you. His name is Da Xian.’

Night and day are different worlds. At dawn, the winding passages have vanished and each path leads straight to a house. The night seems like a distant dream.

When I reach the sky burial site the sun is already up. This site is not a large boulder jutting from a cliff like the one in Lhasa, it is a broad gravel terrace halfway up a mountain between the foothills and the higher slopes. Dirty ropes hang from a metal post that is rammed into a crack in the ground. Beside it lie rusty knives, two hammers and a hatchet with a broken handle. The surrounding gravel is scattered with fragments of bone, human hair, smashed plastic beads, scraps of cloth, and vulture droppings dotted with human fingernails.

The mountain is quiet. Black vultures sit perched on the peaks. In the valley below, ribbons of mist rise from Yamdrok and slowly roll into a single sheet that covers the entire lake. The mist then stirs and spreads, rising and falling over the foothills like a woman breathing, drifting higher and higher until it veils the blood-red sun. Three men emerge from the mist. Dawa, the elder brother, is lugging the hemp sack. The family probably could not afford to hire a body breaker. Dorje, the younger brother, carries a felt bag, a thermos flask and a flat frying pan. A lama in red robes follows behind. I recognise him as the man who sat beside me last night. Clouds of mist billow behind them. They smile at me.

The sack is opened and her body is pulled out. Her limbs are bound in a foetal position. The swastika carved onto her back has dried and shrunk. When the cord is loosened she flops to the ground. The brothers tie her head to the metal post and pull her body straight. She is lying on her back now, eyes fixed on the sky and the spreading clouds of mist.

Dorje sprinkles ground barley onto the flames of a juniper pyre he has just lit. The thick smoke merges into the mist. Dawa adds a dung pat to the fire on the other side, looks into the sky, then drops a lump of yak butter into the frying pan. The lama sits cross-legged on a sheepskin, counting his rosary beads over an open prayer book.

I study Myima through the lens of my camera: limbs splayed, breasts hanging to the side, palms upturned as if communing with the sky, belly still swollen with her unborn child. Her white feet are tightly clenched. The smallest toes are so short they have no nails.

It is a good thing the soldier is not here. He is probably upset I have come, or perhaps he wants me to be here, to say goodbye for him. I imagine Myima arriving at this mountain on horseback as a child of six, her little face peeping out from under her sheepskin cloak to catch her first glimpse of Yamdrok Lake. When she was up here last week tending her sheep, was she thinking of her home in the north, or of the soldier in the valley? One day she asked him, ‘When will you take me to the cities where the houses are as tall as mountains?’

I press the shutter, but nothing happens. It is stuck. Suddenly I see the corner of Myima’s mouth tremble very slightly. It was neither a smile, nor a sneer, but it definitely moved.

I tramp back to the fire and sit down. Dorje takes another dung pat from his bag and feeds it to the flames. Then he pulls out a lump of roast barley, blows the dung away and breaks me off a piece. I chew it greedily. There are raisins inside. He fills the lid of the thermos flask with barley wine. I grab it and down it in one, then take out my knife and hack at the dried mutton. The brothers smile at me. I smile too, perhaps, but my face is turned to the distant snowcaps that are reddening in the morning sun. The mist has gone now, and the lake is as calm and clear as yesterday, and as deep as Myima’s turquoise. Dawa stands up and pours the lama some wine. The lama pushes it away and tells him Myima’s soul has risen to the sky.