It was all so different from drab Beijing.
As a further comfort, Yu had acquired all of Guibert’s clothing and personal effects and had them brought to Yunnan. Nicholai particularly appreciated the razor and small travel mirror, and one morning asked for a bowl of hot water so he could shave.
His image in the mirror was a bit of a shock. His skin was pale, his face drawn, the beard gave him the look of a prison camp survivor. Shaving made him look and feel better, but he realized that he would have to start eating regularly to regain his health.
“I want to get up,” he said.
The young monk who had brought the water looked nervous. “Xue Xin says not for five more days.”
“Is Xue Xin here at the moment?”
The young monk comically looked around the room. “No.”
“Then help me get up, please.”
“I will go ask -”
“If you go ask,” Nicholai said, “I will try to get up on my own while you are gone, and probably fall and die as a result. What would Xue Xin say to you then?”
“He would hit me with a stick.”
“So.”
The monk helped him out of the bed. Nicholai tentatively put some weight on the wounded leg. The pain was ferocious, and it started to buckle beneath him, but the monk steadied him and they walked across the room.
Then back again.
After three trips, Nicholai was exhausted and the monk helped him back into the bed.
The next morning he walked outside.
Painful and slow at first, his walk from the village to the monastery became part of a thrice-daily routine as he rebuilt his physical and mental stamina. Making his unsteady way along the narrow, stone-laid paths, he focused on details – unraveling individual birdsong from the cacophony of a score of species, identifying types of monkeys from their incessant chatter and warning screeches, distinguishing plants and vines from among thousands in the verdant forest.
The jungle was reclaiming the monastery.
Its vines cracked the old stones, swallowed columns and stiles, crept over flagstone pavilions like a patient, persistent tide of Go stones on a board. Yet statues of Buddha peeped through the vegetation, his eyes content with the knowledge that all things change and all physical matter inevitably decays.
The discipline of the walk was good for Nicholai’s mind, and every day the pain lessened and his strength returned until he could walk with strength and confidence. His spirit recovered as well, and soon he began to think about the future.
He almost tripped over the monk.
Xue Xin was on his hands and knees with a small blade, carefully trimming vines away from a stone path that led to a modest stupa. The monk wore a simple brown robe tied at the waist with a belt that had faded almost to white.
He looked up and asked, “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Xue Xin slowly got to his feet and bowed. Nicholai bowed deeply in return.
“You don’t bow like a Frenchman,” Xue Xin said.
“I was raised in China,” Nicholai answered. “Later in Japan.”
Xue Xin laughed. “That explains it. The Japanese, they like to bow.”
“Yes, they do,” Nicholai agreed.
“Would you like to help?” Xue Xin asked.
“Forgive me,” Nicholai said, “but it seems an impossible task.”
“Not at all. Every day I clean each day’s growth away.”
“But it grows back,” Nicholai said. “Then you just have to do it again the next day.”
“Exactly.”
So Nicholai took to helping Xue Xin with the repetitive task of trying to keep the path clear. They met every morning and worked for hours, then stopped and took tea when the afternoon rain slashed down. Nicholai learned that Xue Xin was an honored guest at the monastery.
“They put up with me,” Xue Xin said. “I work. And you?”
“I don’t know if I am a guest here or a prisoner,” Nicholai answered truthfully, although he left it at that.
“As in life itself.” Xue Xin chuckled. “Are we its guest, or its prisoner?”
“As life dictates, I suppose.”
“Not at all,” Xue Xin answered.
“What do you mean?”
“It has stopped raining,” Xue Xin observed in response. They went back to work on the path.
The next day Xue Xin observed, “You attack the vines as if they are your enemy.”
“Are they not?”
“No, they are your allies,” Xue Xin answered. “Without them, you would not have a useful task to perform.”
“I would then have another useful task,” Nicholai answered, annoyed.
“With another set of ally-enemies,” Xue Xin said. “It is always the same, my Eastern-Western friend. But, by all means, if it makes you feel better, attack, attack.”
That night, lying in his kang, lonely and missing Solange, Nicholai had a crisis of the mind and soul. Raised as he was, he was familiar with basic Buddhist philosophy – only the unfamiliar would call it a religion, or the Buddha a god – that all suffering comes from attachment, that we are prisoners of our longings and desires that keep us bound to the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. He knew the Buddhist belief that these longings make us take negative actions – sins, if you must – that create and accumulate bad karma that must be ameliorated through the lifetimes, and that only enlightenment can free us from this trap.
He got up, took his flashlight, and made his way to Xue Xin’s cell. The monk was in full lotus position, meditating.
“You wish to trim vines by moonlight?” Xue Xin asked. “Very well, but do it without me, please.”
“I want my freedom.”
“Then trim vines.”
“That is glib,” Nicholai answered. “I expect more from you than Zen riddles.”
“You are suffering?”
Nicholai nodded.
Xue Xin opened his eyes, exhaled a long breath as if to reluctantly end his meditation, and then said, “Sit down. You cannot find enlightenment, you can only be open to it finding you. That’s satori.”
“And why you chose it as a code word,” Nicholai said. “Back in Beijing.”
“You needed to see things as they really were,” Xue Xin answered. “Until then, there was no helping you.”
“If you cannot find satori, how-”
“It might come in a drop of rain,” Xue Xin continued, ignoring the question, “a note from a faraway flute, the fall of a leaf. Of course, you have to be ready for it or it will pass unnoticed. But if you are ready, and your eyes are open, you will see it and suddenly understand everything. Then you will know who you are and what you must do.”
“Satori.”
“Satori,” Xue Xin repeated. Then he added, “If our thoughts imprison us, it stands to reason that they can also set us free.”
Yu came to see him the next morning.
The Chinese had accepted his offer.
94
THE NORMAL ROUTE of arms shipments from China to Vietnam, Yu explained, was through Lang Son, across the border, and directly into the north of Vietnam, where the Viet Minh had secure sanctuaries in the mountainous jungles.
But they were not going to take that route.
The rocket launchers were needed in the south, not the north.
“That is information that our enemies would pay dearly to obtain,” Yu said.
Indeed it is, Nicholai thought. Since its last disastrous effort in the south, the Viet Minh had confined their activities to the north. But now it appeared that, if armed with the new weaponry, they were planning to launch a new southern front.