Peter Dickinson - Tulku

Above the main buildings the cliff was pocked with the mouths of caves, and below lay a huddle of small squat huts and exotic shrines. The whole site faced east and was already deep in the shade of the mountain behind it, so the faint glow of lights at many of the windows added to the sense of a huge, mysterious life born out of the very mountain.

‘I have been to Lhasa and seen the great Potala,’ intoned the Lama in his clanging Mandarin. ‘I have travelled in India and seen the mighty shrines of that land. I have seen even the sea. But in all this world of illusion I have seen no illusion that can compare with Dong Pe.’

11

FOR ONLY THE second time since the destruction of the Settlement Theodore was suddenly convinced that his prayers were being listened to. Once, at the top of that far-away rock pillar, when he had tried to pray for Mrs Jones; and now, here, in the guest-house below the gates of Dong Pe monastery, with the bitter mountain air fingering his shoulder-blades as he knelt on the rug beside his cot, while his lips moved as usual through the automatic phrases and his mind roamed helplessly.

He had been thinking, as it happened, about Lung. Two images had floated side by side into his head – that last morning in the valley, Lung lying with his head in Mrs Jones’s lap, drifting in love; and his arrival at the guest-house last night, snarling with sulky suspicion. Theodore liked Lung; at the start of the journey he had seemed at least half-absurd, but slowly Theodore had discovered some of what Mrs Jones had seen in him: humour and intelligence, and a kind of exulting innocence which he occasionally let gleam from behind the fastidious façade. But Theodore, despite that liking, had not been able to grasp the depth and strength of Lung’s love for Mrs Jones, and so had found it hard to bear the apparently childish fits of sulks that had followed its ending. Now, in his half-dreamy state, self-hypnotized by the empty repetition of words, he found himself laying the two images side by side, the exultation and the misery, as if they were two pieces of cloth he was comparing. He was swept with a wave of sympathy for poor Lung, as sudden and powerful as the scent of honeysuckle come upon at dusk.

As the wave ebbed he knew he was being listened to – not the movement of his lips, but his thought. It was as though, wandering round the deserted chapel of his soul, he had found a footprint in the dust that was not his own. He stopped praying, opened his eyes and stared around. Opposite him hung a shimmery cloth woven with a picture of the Buddha cross-legged on his throne and surrounded by grimacing warriors and monsters and calm, bare-breasted women. The guest-house was a gaudy tunnel, sharp-lit by the morning light through small square windows. Lung lay curled on his cot. From behind a partition of blue and scarlet hangings came Mrs Jones’s light snore, contented as the purr of a cat. Neither of them had been the listener. The Buddha was only a picture, smiling that sweet inane smile. And the listener was fading now, fading, gone – frightened, as it were, by the sudden concentration of Theodore’s thought. That first morning he rose, smiling self mockingly at the sudden whimsy that his visitor might have been the Siddha Asara; he could not then know how many times, morning and evening, he would find the same nameless presence waiting to pray beside him.

As they breakfasted he became aware that the relationship between Mrs Jones and Lung had changed again. She had spent a full hour last night, coaxing the poor young man out of his sulks, and when Theodore had dozed into sleep they had still been sitting side by side by the stove, talking in low voices. She must have told him about the child she might be carrying, his child. He seemed very uncertain how to react – shy, puppyish and strangely clumsy. It was as though the idea that the love-affair might ever result in offspring had not crossed his mind before. Mrs Jones found his behaviour irritating and was sharp with him, but instead of lapsing back into sulks he tried to turn his clumsiness into a joke, which only made her crosser still. She was at a high pitch of irritation when they heard a soft knock at the door.

‘Visitors I can do without this morning,’ she snapped. ‘Go on, one of you! Ain’t you going to let them in?’

Lung scrambled to the door, almost colliding with the Lama Amchi who had chosen that moment to open it and enter. He was followed by a tall young monk, very thin, with a round smooth head too small for his body. Everybody bowed like dolls. Unasked the two monks settled cross-legged on the floor, completing a circle round Mrs Jones’s stove. Mrs Jones produced two more of the steel mugs from her hamper and filled them from the tea-pot. They all sat in silence for a while, as if the stove were an object set there for them to contemplate. The steam drifted up from the mugs. Theodore wanted to fidget, but stayed still.

‘I introduce to you the Monk Tomdzay,’ said the Lama Amchi suddenly. ‘He will come here each morning, so that if you have any wishes or needs you may tell him and he will see that they are met.’

‘I am honoured to be of service,’ said the young monk in very good Mandarin with barely a trace of the Tibetan twang.

‘Delighted to meet his excellency,’ said Mrs Jones in her drawing-room voice.

There was another long silence, broken only by the smack and suck of the holy men gulping at the scalding tea.

‘Oh, come on!’ said Mrs Jones at last. ‘Ain’t one of you going to ask what happens next? Is there any harm in me going botanizing? When are they going to consult this here oracle they’re on about? Lung, my love, you’ll have to tell him I told you what’s up.’

Lung’s embarrassment took the form of language so flowery and contorted that Mrs Jones became more and more impatient, and eventually cut Lung’s translation short with an unmistakable gesture.

‘What a bunch of idiots! You have a go, Theo, get it into their heads I got to know what’s up.’

But the Lama Amchi seemed to have understood both the gesture and the motive behind it.

‘The time is not propitious to consult the oracle,’ he said smiling. ‘In some days, however, the astrological signs will change and then we will hold the ceremony. Meanwhile, go where you will. If you wish to journey in the valley, Tomdzay will arrange for an escort. In most parts of the monastery too you may come and go as you like – we are not a sect that forbids the presence of women. Indeed, many of our monks are married. You will not see me again until the ceremony of the oracle, as the time has come for me to retire and engage in meditation, but as I say Tomdzay will attend to all your wants.’

While Theodore repeated the explanation to Mrs Jones, the Lama Amchi returned to his tea. Perhaps he was already half-withdrawn into his meditation, but his noddings and suckings made him seem much older and less commanding than he had been during the journey, like a gaffer mumbling by the hearth. Suddenly he rose to his feet with a single effortless movement that was almost as though he had floated himself upright. Tomdzay copied him. They bowed. The Lama Amchi intoned a few words in Tibetan and they were gone.

‘What a pair of beauties!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Each one as sly as the other. Now listen, I been thinking. First off, this oracle’s going to say whatever old Amchi tells it. His idea is get the baby born and then tell everyone it’s this Tulku they’ve been waiting for . . .’

‘What when child is maybe girl?’ interrupted Lung.

‘They’ll have a baby boy ready somewhere, mark my words. You see, it ain’t only finding their Tulku and dishing the Chinese as appeals to Amchi – it’s having the kid so young. F’rinstance, even if he’d managed to convince himself it was Theo here, like he tried to first off, that wouldn’t of been half as good, ’cause of Theo being getting on for grown up. But if he starts with a kid aged nothing, that’s another twenty years Amchi’s got of running this here monastery before the kid takes over.’