I had some cash on me so I played at roulette, lost a few euros, and played and lost a few more. That night there was an old paratrooper who had fought in Algeria at the same table as me, and as I continued to lose — we being virtually the only two players at the table — he took off the patch that covered a missing eye and laid it on the table in front of him as a mark of respect. Up to that moment I hadn’t known what it would be like to lose money in this way — so pointlessly — and this curious offhand gesture reassured me, I didn’t know why. The vacated eye was sealed over with pale scar tissue, and this made the other working eye exceedingly jaunty. “It’s like losing the men in your unit,” he said half-seriously. “The mission goes on.”
Then he said: “Un homme qui ne joue pas c’est comme un homme qui s’est jamais marié—c’est a dire un petit con.” A man who doesn’t play the tables is like a man who has never married — a little shit.
That was the beginning of it. I’ve had fond memories of Enghiens-les-Bain ever since. It was nothing more than a taste for solitude, a capacity for solitude. Thereafter I went every month on business and gambled on the side. It became a secret hobby, as it often does. I started to play baccarat online, sometimes winning hundreds of pounds a month. I became a sharp at it. And then I began to lose. Soon, I was traveling to Birmingham at the weekends to play the tables. You could not imagine anything more pathetic. I thought of nothing else. It was like a grudge. I was convinced I had been stiffed the previous weekend when I had lost everything. I couldn’t accept it. And of course there was nowhere serious to gamble in Sussex in those days, or even in London. I felt cut adrift. It really didn’t seem fair. I went to Paris, too, and got into the swing of roulette, a terrible game really. There was no adrenaline in it, but it was better than nothing. One only has to play a given game for a few months before it becomes second nature; I became good at everything I played, though that did not mean I won consistently. What I discovered was a taste for losing. I understood in some way that playing something well and losing at it had something to do with playing it over the long haul. But I didn’t care, and I dare say no player does.
She was now awake and relit the pipe and we had another go at it, and soon the balance of our talk had shifted again and she began to tell her own story, as if mine needed to be evened out by hers. I had become a secret player inside a fairly comfortable life, but she had migrated from Kham.
“When I left Sando, I had to hitch a ride to Daocheng. My mother hoped I would help her eat, so she didn’t stop me.”
She sucked in the smoke and sank back onto the sofa bed.
“I didn’t mind. I was happy to wait the whole night in Daocheng for the bus.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen. It was illegal to leave. I walked to the bus station and waited there all night. There was a bus south in the morning. I had enough to get all the way south. I got a job as a hostess in Guangzhou. I bought some makeup and some dresses. Some shoes. I became good at it. I had the looks, the youth. I made hard cash every week under the table. I shared an apartment with five girls. We all cooked together. In the summer we went to Hainan and slept with old men. We worked the hotels.”
But then she talked at greater length. Her father had been a welder working on hotel projects of Chengdu, and he was never home. He had found a better life. Her mother worked in the fields.
She was the only child. She had gone to school in the village, bright, industrious, and seemingly little connected to her cold, fractious parents. It was rumored in the village that the father had run off to the big city with a waitress from a tourist hotel in Litang, and it was probably true. Her mother, half-abandoned, labored on grimly without mentioning it to her daughter. In the winters he would sometimes come back and make his awful “Zhang wine” in huge glass vats. He fermented them all winter with medicinal herbs and then drank himself into oblivion. He spoke to Dao-Ming in Mandarin, and to his wife in Zhang. He had picked up some airs in the big city.
The winters in those high lands were unimaginable. Before they were snowed in and the road between Daocheng and Litang was closed, her mother took her on their motorbike into the hills where Zhang farmers in their tall Stetson hats and pointed boots sold medicinal roots to passing cars. In the autumn and the early spring they rode into Litang and spun the gold-plated prayer wheels in the temple and bought gas canisters for the house. They went to another temple outside Daocheng, that bitter and wind-blasted town, a place of white stupas along the banks of a rippling, stone-filled river, where the grassland was flat and white with ice. The mountains there were strewn with lines of prayer flags that ran from the summits into the ravines below and made them look like immense cakes. They could walk from village to village, her mother flipping her little prayer wheel in one hand and summoning Buddha to mind with recitations.
It was a holy land. In spring they would see picnic parties of monks in brilliant boat-shaped gold hats sitting in the new grass with yak herds dotting the dark green slopes. The tents of the Zhang nomads with walls around them. In the villages at the bottom of the gorges the houses were whitewashed. Their flat roofs were piled with drying straw and the windows and lintels painted with the violent colors of the Tibetan afterlife. The swollen rivers churned through them like floodwaters; in the awakening rose gardens the old women stood in their straw hats like ghosts, but their eyes were alive.
But before spring came around they were trapped in the valley. They were enclosed alongside the monastery in their gaunt, dark-brown fortress houses, around which the shallow rivers ran. The monastery’s wooden gates and loggias were painted with gods and demons. In the woods below it lay the adobe huts of the monks. Dao-Ming went into the temple every day with a renminbi note, climbed the ladder to the first floor, and walked on the balcony that curled around the shrine. With the truck drivers and the traveling mechanics, she dropped her note onto the floor below and wished for her father to come back from the city and stay. He never did. The yak butter candles glittering in the dark never answered her prayer. She began to understand why he had left.
When her mother took her to the temple outside Daocheng, she told her that the dead were not really dead, they were merely being reborn, but sometimes being reborn was worse than suffering extinction.
“If you disappeared, you wouldn’t suffer. Being reborn forever — no wonder the Communists told us it was an evil religion.”
“It isn’t evil,” Dao-Ming said. “It’s just true. Whatever is the truth is bound to be horrifying.”
She prayed herself, and worked the fields when she was thirteen; she was never sick and the snow never affected her. No one knew what was going to become of her. She was too refined and aloof for the local boys. She was never going to be a truck driver’s wife, or a farmer. She was never going to stay in the beautiful valleys of Kham. “I’m a hardheaded peasant,” she said, “but not hardheaded enough, or too much so. Or maybe I’m not as much of a true peasant as I think I am. I admire them, though. To me, the word is a compliment. I wish I were more like my mother. Enduring.”