CHAPTER 5
Lancang, Tibet
The problem with the sacred ducks was that they kept eating the coins in the pool.
There were signs up everywhere asking visitors to the monastery not to throw coins, but Brother Kalden had watched streams of old ladies glare at the signs and ignore them in the pointed way of people who would claim not to be able to read if you tried to take them up on it.
And so now he was hurrying after a coughing duck, who didn’t realize he was trying to help and ran away.
He had to pause for a rest against the old salt well, wheezing, breath steaming in the clear morning cold.
This altitude. He had joined the monastery a month ago, and he was all right now, mostly, but running around at fourteen thousand feet was enough to make him collapse after about forty seconds.
Those elderly ladies kept lapping him on the toil up and down the mountain.
He was glad he was giving them a little giggle whenever they saw him, but he was beginning to wish his lungs would hurry up and embrace the new life.
He lifted his phone and took a video of himself being defeated by a duck, and turned the camera around in time to show the duck swimming smugly away and—was he imagining it?—clinking.
It was part of his duties to maintain a social media channel about daily life as a monk.
Initially, when the abbot had given him the phone, he had worried that he didn’t know enough yet to do a decent job.
The abbot had laughed and said, “That’s the point.
Show the ordinary side. Start with the ducks.
” He was right. Kalden’s three-way war of attrition with the elderly ladies and the ducks was attracting quite a lot of people to the monastery website.
Below him, the great salt works glimmered their way down the gorge of the Lancang River.
From so high up, the works looked like a natural formation of striations in the mountains, rows and rows of vertical terraces, but they weren’t: they were platforms, standing stacked above the river on high cedar posts.
Closer to him, the pans were red; further away, they were white.
Here and there, gem pools of brilliant green shone too.
It was to do with the kind of silt in the pools, he’d heard; the colour affected the flavour of the salt.
Small figures stood in the more evaporated pools, raking the salt into patterned ridges nearly like mandalas.
Salt stalactites hung from the terraces, and up the steep side of the valley, donkeys laboured to pull carts filled with salt sacks. No roads out here.
That was why he had wanted to come. In this quiet, you could hear yourself pray.
Sometimes you could even hear in the quality of the high mountain quiet that something was listening.
Even the salt miners, pragmatic people who wore gum boots and pretended not to speak Mandarin when the inevitable news crews came from Beijing to make their yearly feature,3 said that you could hear singing in the river, if you made your mind quiet.
Kalden couldn’t hear it, as such. He understood why people called it hearing, but this felt more like the memory of hearing than hearing fresh. It was a song, and it was a feeling too. Something vast and . . . good.
He had it very clearly, he noticed, whenever he was near a salt well. There was water down there somewhere, densely salty water, but when he first arrived, the abbot had thrown a pebble down to show him how deep it was. So deep you couldn’t hear the splash. Only the song.
“Brother, brother!” Two of the littlest boys rushed up to him. The monastery took boys as young as six, and they were unbearably sweet. These two had hands full of yuan coins. “We got, we got these out of the ducks’ nests for you!”
“Do a magic trick!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kalden said, pretending to die of altitude sickness against the side of the well.
The boys squeaked and pushed some coins into his hands. “Do the magic trick, do the magic trick!”
“Oh . . . okay, okay.” He sat down on the ground and they crowded into his lap, which made doing the tricks harder, but even if he was useless with the ducks, he was good at this.
He’d made a living doing magic tricks outside a railway station when he was little.
“Ready . . . Up we go!” He flicked a coin.
“Flower side up. Ready for it to do that again? And . . . again. And again. You try.”
The boys flicked some coins obediently, and of course the coins wouldn’t cooperate, because Kalden was switching the coins around when he did it. Numbers side, flower side, number side.
“What? You must have bad coins. Up! Oh . . . no, there we are. Flowers again!” He did two at a time, both hands. “And again. And again . . .”
For some reason, it was their favourite thing in the world.
They both fell about laughing. They still had chesty baby laughs.
One of them dove into his pocket like a puppy to investigate the smartphone—they hardly ever saw phones up here—so Kalden showed him how to take a video.
Vibrating with importance, they both filmed him doing the trick, and squealed with pretend indignation when he cuddled them both.
“Now film us, now film us!” one of them demanded. He always said everything twice, not confident you would listen on the first go. Under the red monastery robes, he had on a puffer jacket that made him into a little ball.
“I’m doing it,” Kalden said, laughing too. “Go!”
They both flicked their coins, and let out delighted squeaks when they both threw flowers three times in a row. Kalden laughed too and wondered what the chances were. Well. Not that mad. One in twelve, was it?
A few hours later, feeling worried, he went to see the abbot.
The abbot was admiring the new fairy lights he had just put up in the chapel.
They were rainbow colours, and the light gleamed on the gold of the thangkas across the walls, bringing out all the time-faded tints and details.
Kalden, who had never seen the inside of a monastery until he was twelve, still thought sometimes that it was strange to see these incredible images of the fourteenth or fifteenth century lit not by candlelight but neon as they so often were, but he loved it.
Colour was sacred, and he was privately certain that the monks from those lost centuries would have liked the electric lights too.
“So you’re saying,” the abbot said gently, “that the problem is that the boys have learned how to do a magic trick?”
Kalden wrung his hat between his hands. It was rainbow-coloured too; the abbot, who knitted, had made it for him as a welcome present. “No, sir, it’s—that they don’t know how to do it, but it’s working anyway. Can I show you what the trick is?”
The abbot looked bemused, but he nodded, and Kalden showed him the trick.
“You have to switch the coins, you see? You have to hold one the right way round and then swap it in.”
“I see?”
“But . . . that isn’t what they’re doing,” Kalden said, and showed him the video he had taken of them a few minutes ago.
“They’re just doing a normal coin toss. And—it’s all of them, all the little ones.
They only throw flower-side-up. All day.
I worked it out with a calculator. The chances are .
. . well, it’s something like one in forty billion now. ”
He had thought the abbot would laugh at him.
Instead, the abbot watched the video twice, then nodded slowly.
Outside, there was a soft chiming; some visitors were walking around the walls of the monastery, hands trailing on the prayer wheels to keep them spinning.
It was good for your soul to pace out a circuit every day, but Kalden was still impressed by the number of people who came up the mountain to do it.
“I see,” the abbot said.
“What’s happening?” Kalden asked, and heard how like a child he sounded.
The abbot squeezed his arm. “What was it that happened to your leg, did you ever tell me?”
“I was hit by a cab when I used to work by the railway station.”
“All right. I want you to walk the wheels and pray for your health today.” He thought about it. “And put in a good word about my sciatica.”
“Yes, sir,” Kalden said, puzzled, but you were supposed to be puzzled by abbots.
The abbot smiled, but he was looking at the thangka by the door now.
It showed the mountain, and the spirit who lived beneath it; a many-faced, many-limbed figure who reminded Kalden of a Hindu god, if one had ever belonged in these snow-swept altitudes, with eagle wings and the pelt of a leopard, and many faces.
3 The documentaries were always roughly titled something like How Picturesque a Genuine Tang Dynasty Salt Mine Is, In What Is Genuinely Part of China Because Tibet Is Not a Separate Country, Honest. The journalists always seemed chagrined to find that among all the picturesque, traditional salt pans, people didn’t float around in Tang Dynasty robes reciting poetry but cadged cigarettes behind the storage sheds in bright red Adidas trousers, and that the monks all wore sneakers under their robes, and woolly hats, sometimes with a pom-pom on.
You could see them wanting to wail that it wasn’t in keeping.
This fuelled the strictly unspoken competition to see who could acquire the most tasteless sneakers.
Not, of course, that monks engaged in worldly concerns, but if people would keep donating things, well . . .