'So. The whole world fell into disarray, and now we've lived in the war's shadow for so long we don't know what full sunlight would look like. Science keeps making advances, but many of them rebound on us. The natural world is being poisoned by our great numbers and our crude industries. And if we quarrel again, all could be lost. You are probably aware, certainly most governments are, that science could provide us very quickly with extremely powerful bombs, they say one bomb per city, and so that threat hangs over us too. If any country tries for such a bomb, all may follow.
'So, all these dangers inspired the creation of the League of All Peoples, in the hope of making a global system that could cope with our global problems. That came on the heels of the Year One effort, standardized measurements, and all the rest, to form what has been called the scientizing of the world, or the modernization, or the Hodenosaunee programme, among other names for it. Our time, in effect.'
'In Islam they don't like all that,' one student pointed out.
'Yes, this has been a problem for them, how to reconcile their beliefs with the scientizing movement. But we have seen changes in Nsara spread through most of Firanja, and what a united Firanja implies is that they have agreed there is more than one way to be a good Muslim. If your Islam is a form of sufism that is Buddhist in all but name, and you say it is all right, then it is hard to condemn the Buddhists in the next valley. And this is happening in many places. All the strands are beginning to weave together, you see. We have had to do it to survive.'
At the end of that first set of classes, the history teachers invited Bao to stay on and do it on a regular basis; and after some thought, he accepted their invitation. He liked these people, and the work that came from them. The bulk of the college's efforts had to do with growing more food, with fitting people into the natural systems of the earth less clum sily. History was part of this, and the history teachers were friendly. Also a single woman his age, a lecturer in linguistics, had been particularly friendly through the time of his stay. They had eaten quite a few meals together, and got into the habit of meeting for lunch. Her name was Gao Qirignian.
Bao moved into the small group of cottages where Gao lived, renting one next to hers that had come open at just the right time. The cottages were Japanese in style, with thin walls and big windows, all clustered around a common garden. It was a nice little neighbourhood.
In the mornings Bao started to hoe and plant vegetables in one corner of that central garden. Through a gap between the cottages he could see the great valley oaks in their streamside gallery; beyond them the green rice paddies, and the isolated peak of Mount Miwok, over a hundred li away, south of the great delta. To the cast and north, more rice paddies, curving green on green. The coastal range lay to the west, the Cold Mountains to the east. He rode an old bicycle to the college for classes, and taught his smaller seminars at a set of picnic tables by the side of the stream, under a stand of enormous valley oaks. Every once in a while he would rent a little airboat from the airport just west of town, and pilot it down the delta to Fangzhang, to visit Anzi and her family. Though Bao and Anzi remained stiff and fractious with each other, the repetition of these visits eventually made them seem normal, a pleasant ritual in most respects. They did not seem connected to his memories of the past, but an event of their own. Well, Bao would say to Gao, I'm going to go down to Fangzhang and bicker with my daughter.
Have fun, Gao would say.
Mainly he stayed in Putatoi, and taught classes. He liked the young people and their fresh faces. He liked the people who lived in the cluster of cottages around the garden. They worked in agriculture, mostly, either in the college's agronomy labs and experimental fields, or out in the paddies and orchards themselves. That was what people did in this valley. The neighbours all gave him advice on how best to cultivate his little garden, and very often it was conflicting advice, which was no very reassuring thing given that they were among the world's experts on the topic, and that there might be more people than there was food in the world to feed them. But that too was a lesson, and though it worried him, it also made him laugh. And he liked the labour, the sitting in the earth, weeding and looking at vegetables grow. Staring across rice terraces at Mount Miwok. He babysat for some of the younger couples in the cottages, and talked with them about the events of the town, and spent the evenings out lawn bowling with a group who liked to do that.
Before long the routines of this life became as if they were the only ones he had ever known. One morning, babysitting for a little girl who had caught the chicken pox, sitting by her as she lay thoughtlessly in a lukewarm oatmeal bath, stoically flicking the water with her finger and occasionally moaning like a small animal, he felt a sudden gust of happiness sweep through him, simply because he was the old widower of the neighbourhood, and people used him as a babysitter. Old Dragonfish. There had been just such a man back in Beijing, living in a hole in the wall by the Big Red Gate, repairing shoes and watching the children in the street.
The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since Pan's death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among now were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao – not the companions of his fate just people he had fallen in with by accident – nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances – the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighbourhood – these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And so now he was the old widower, the babysitter, the broken down old bureaucrat poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbours, and he liked his role among them.
Time passed. He continued to teach a few classes, arranging for his seminars to meet out under the valley oaks.
'History!' he would say to them. 'It's a hard thing to get at. There is no easy way to imagine it. The Earth rolls around the sun, three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days a year, for year after year. Thousands of these years have passed. Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings. Eventually much of the matter and life on the planet was entrained to their use, and then they had to work out what they wanted to do, beyond merely staying alive. Then they told each other stories of how they had got where they were, what had happened, and what it meant.'
Bao sighed. His students watched him.
'The way Zhu told the story, it is a matter of tragedy for the individual, comedy for the society. Over the long pulses of historical time, reconciliations can be achieved, that's the comedy; but every individual meets a tragic end. We have to admit here that no matter what else we say, for the individual death is always an end and a catastrophe.'
His students regarded him steadily, perfectly willing to admit this, for they were all about twenty five years old, while he was near seventy, and so they felt immortal. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. A very useful function! And it gave the old some amusement as well, as well as an extra pinch from their own mortality to remind them to appreciate life.