Читать книгу The Breath of God - Jeffrey Small - Страница 11

CHAPTER 3

PUNAKHA, BHUTAN

IN THE DARKNESS, GRANT COULD HEAR soft voices speaking in a language he didn’t understand. He became conscious of an unfamiliar smell: some sort of incense infused in a musty atmosphere. He shifted his weight; his arms felt heavy, as did his head. Gradually, the light returned, as if someone had slowly turned up a dimmer switch on his temple. He lay on a lumpy cot in a small room with a stone floor and sand-colored plaster walls. A pair of candles burned on a simple wooden desk by a narrow window. A second smaller table by his bed contained a carved wooden bowl and a hand-hammered tin cup.

Three men stood by the door, whose heavy timbers, painted a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, and blues, provided the only color in the drab room. The men stopped speaking and turned their heads toward him.

“Where am I?” Grant croaked. His swollen tongue filled his dry mouth. He tried unsuccessfully to raise himself on his elbows. “What happened?”

The men approached his bed. Grant recognized two as monks because of their robes, sandals, and shaved heads, but the third was dressed in a gho—a plaid, knee-length woolen robe whose sleeves were rolled into cuffs exposing a hint of a white shirt worn underneath. On his feet the man wore leather shoes and argyle socks. Grant had first encountered the traditional Bhutanese garb on his arrival at the Paro airport. How many days ago, he was no longer sure.

The man in the gho responded in heavily accented in English, “Don’t try to move.” In answer to the confused look on Grant’s face, he said, “My name’s Karma. I am the Punakha drungtsho—the town’s doctor. You suffered a complete fracture of your right tibia. Worst I’ve seen.”

For the first time, Grant became aware of his right leg, elevated on a folded blanket. He touched the rough plaster cast that ran from his hip to his toes. Then he glanced at his watch, a digital sports model with a waterproof band of rubber. The push of a button gave him the barometric pressure, altitude, and temperature—all for under a hundred dollars. Grant’s favorite feature, though, was the tiny radio receiver that kept the time and date precisely set to the second. He was never late to an appointment.

When his eyes focused on the date, he shouted, “Four days!”

“You’ve been unconscious,” Karma told him. “Should have died on the river from loss of blood, but your wet suit acted as a compression bandage and restricted the bleeding until these two rescued you.” He nodded toward the monks.

Grant turned to catch a better look at them. The older one was dressed in a neatly wrapped orange robe that fell to his ankles. Judging from the salt-and-pepper stubble sprinkled across his shaved head, the monk was in his late fifties. His face was angular, with prominent cheek and jaw bones that joined to a point at his chin. The monk studied Grant with black eyes that were Asian in character but wide in shape, and placed close together. His unblinking gaze should have been disconcerting, but for a reason Grant couldn’t explain, he found it comforting. His younger companion, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, had a rounder face with a mixture of Tibetan and Chinese features. Several inches shorter than the older monk, and wearing crimson rather than orange robes, he was skinny in a still-filling-out sort of way.

“Thank you,” Grant said to all three men, his fingers tapping his cast. “But what ...” As if a projector in his head had suddenly come to life, the recent events replayed for him: the river, the rush of the cold water, grasping for his guide’s kayak, the panic of being trapped underwater. From the corner of his eye he spotted his PFD on the floor by the table. Instinctually, he touched the wool blanket covering his chest. He guessed what had happened. When he blacked out from the breaking of his leg and lack of oxygen, the current must have pulled him free of the boulder. The flotation device would have shot him to the surface.

“My guide, Dasho?” he asked, dreading the answer he already knew.

The older monk approached the bed and rested a warm hand on Grant’s shoulder. He answered in precise English with an unexpectedly clear British accent. “I am sad to report that our brothers found his body downriver from the dzong. He was upside down, still in his kayak.”

Grant swallowed back the acidic taste of bile that rose to the back of his throat. If he hadn’t requested to go on the most challenging section of the river, Dasho would still be alive. Maybe if I’d tried harder in the hydraulic? The friendly guide had been supporting his family.

As if reading Grant’s thoughts, the monk added, “You couldn’t have saved him. His neck was broken.”

Grant broke eye contact. He didn’t find comfort in the information. To distract his thoughts, he glanced around at his spartan surroundings.

“Is this some kind of hospital?”

“My apprentice and I found you lying on the riverbank about a mile from here,” the elder monk replied. “We carried you to the closest building where we could provide help—to the Punakha Dzong.”

The leftover haze vanished from Grant’s mind. The Punakha Dzong was his next stop. He remembered driving past the imposing five-hundred-year-old fortress rising from the peninsula where the Mo Chhu and the Pho Chhu joined. Constructed in traditional Bhutanese style, its massive inward-sloping walls of whitewashed stone starkly contrasted with the intricately carved and painted wood molding around the windows and doors—in the same style as the painted door to his room, he realized. A colorful cornice anchored the pagoda-style roof.

He recalled Dasho’s explanation that although the dzongs were originally forts built to protect the country from invaders who crossed the imposing Himalayan range and attacked from neighboring Tibet or India, today they served a dual purpose: to house both the local government offices and the country’s Buddhist monasteries. Evaluating the furnishings in his room, Grant guessed that he must be in the living quarters of the monastery.

The monk who spoke English so well held out his hand. “I am Kinley Goenpo, the senior monk here during the summer season, and this is my student, Jigme.” Jigme bowed from the waist but remained silent.

“Grant Matthews. Thanks so much for rescuing me, but ...” Grant struggled for the right way to express his concern. “Shouldn’t I go to a hospital—have a surgeon x-ray my leg?” He again drummed his fingers on the gray plaster.

The doctor shook his head. “Kinley and I debated the idea of moving you, but the nearest hospital is in our capital city, Thimpu, a three-hour drive over the mountains. My little office in town wouldn’t provide you any more help than I can offer you in this room. Fortunately, your leg sustained a clean break, though a severe one. If you stay off it for the next six weeks, it should heal nicely. You’ll go home with just a scar as a souvenir of your adventure.”

“Six weeks?” Grant felt the blood drain from his already pallid face. He still had many monasteries to investigate, and then he had to be back at school in ten days. His palms began to sweat.

Karma shook his head. “Any movement before your leg stabilizes risks permanent disability.”

“I shouldn’t have even gone kayaking,” Grant mumbled, feeling sorry for himself and guilty for his role in Dasho’s death. Grant glared at his cast as if the sheer force of his gaze would fuse his bones together. His original plan had been to spend just an hour or so in this monastery, to let his guide ask the monks some questions, and then move on if the legend about a boy named Issa didn’t ring any bells.

Kinley lowered himself to the edge of Grant’s bed. “I understand your frustration. We will work with you to make your stay as comfortable as possible.”

Grant craned his neck to search the room. “Did you find my stuff? I had a dry bag in my kayak—my credit cards and cell phone.”

“My brothers who found your guide’s body also found your kayak,” Kinley replied. “It was empty.”

Even though the room was cool from the September breeze flowing through the open window, Grant felt flushed with heat. He pushed the quilted blanket covering his torso to his waist so that he could breathe more easily. He looked down to find that he was wearing an off-white cotton shirt; the monks must have dressed him. The material was coarse, and Grant felt it start to scratch his skin.

“Can you lend me a phone? I need to call my professor and let him know what’s happened.” He owed his mentor so much. Grant refused to worry, much less disappoint him. Billingsly had gone to bat for him with the Emory admissions committee. He still recalled his professor’s words verbatim from seven years ago: “Grant has one of the best analytical minds I’ve seen. Harvard was foolish to reject him because of that incident.”

The elder monk shook his head. “Oh, there are no cell phones in the goemba , the monastery, but if you give the number to Karma, he can call anyone you wish when he returns to town.”

Grant flopped his head on the thin pillow. “I suppose email is out of the question too?”

Kinley shook his head. Grant thought he detected something in the monk’s eyes. Is this amusing to him? Grant stared at the fine lines crisscrossing the beige ceiling. Bedridden in a jail cell of a room in a remote monastery with some monks who were enjoying his predicament. For the first time since he’d woken, Grant became aware of the throbbing pain in his leg. He also realized that his left shoulder was bruised, and he had a pounding headache behind his temples.

“What about the bathroom?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

The doctor chuckled and bent over to retrieve a battered metal bedpan from the floor beside the bed. “I brought this from town.”

Grant wiped his palms off on the sheets. Accepting this situation for six weeks was out of the question. He needed to devise a plan.

“Pen and paper?” he asked the men.

“That we can do,” Kinley said, nodding to the doctor. Karma reached into his black bag—the kind of doctor’s bag that Grant had seen in old TV shows but didn’t think were used anymore—and produced a ballpoint pen and a blank prescription pad.

Grant wrote Harold Billingsly’s office number at Emory and the name of his hotel in town, the Zangdho Pelri, and handed it to the doctor. “Room oneoh-eight. If you don’t mind, I have a backpack with my clothes, and my laptop is on the desk.”

Before Karma could respond, the door to the room opened. A third monk, a boy no older than ten or eleven with a perfectly round bald head, dressed like Kinley’s apprentice Jigme in a crimson robe, entered carrying a steaming cup centered on a tray.

Kinley took the cup from the boy and patted his shoulder in a fatherly way. “Thank you, Ummon.”

After the boy bowed to the older monk and left the room, the doctor emptied the contents of a small envelope into the cup. “Drink this,” he said. “It will ease your discomfort.”

Grant sniffed the cup, wondering what sort of herbal concoction he was about to consume. He took a sip. Just a little bitter. He hoped the effects would kick in quickly. After Grant finished the tea, the doctor left, but the two monks remained, watching him silently.

“I appreciate your help, but really you don’t need to stay.” Grant focused on the notepad on his lap. He drew a line down the center of the page and wrote at the top of the left column “Options.” At the top of the right he wrote “Plan of Attack.”

Kinley sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in his lap.

“Grant, you are experiencing the dukkha of life.”

Without looking up from his notepad, he responded, “Suffering.” He resisted the temptation to glance at the monk to gauge his surprise at Grant’s knowledge of the Pali word: it was the language of the ancient Buddhist canon. Grant enjoyed near-photographic recall of the texts he’d studied. His comparative religions class had been six years earlier, but he still remembered the basic tenets of Buddhism as if he’d read them yesterday.

“Yes, that’s the common translation, but not entirely accurate,” Kinley said without missing a beat. “Actually, dukkha means out of balance, like a cart with a broken wheel.”

“So you’re saying that my life is out of whack right now.” Grant put his pen down and looked Kinley in the eye. “I could have told you that.”

“Indulge me in a story,” Kinley began, as if he were telling a fable to a group of children gathered at his feet. “A farmer in the foothills of the mountains had a beautiful horse that ran away. The farmer’s neighbor stopped by to console him on losing such a magnificent animal, but the farmer surprised his neighbor by saying, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’ The next day his horse returned, bringing with it a herd of similarly beautiful wild horses. The neighbor returned and said, ‘You were right yesterday not to wallow in your loss. Look how fortunate you are now with all these horses.’ But the farmer surprised him again by repeating his comment from the previous day, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’ A few weeks later the farmer’s son fractured his leg while trying to break in one of the new horses. Of course, the neighbor returns to offer his condolences again, certain that the farmer cannot be unaffected by his son’s injury.”

“Let me guess,” Grant intervened, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Even with his son lying in bed, his leg in a splint, the farmer repeats his previous response, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’”

Kinley grinned and rested a hand on Grant’s cast. “The following week the army came through the farmer’s village, drafting men to go to war, but they passed over the farmer’s son because of the broken leg.”

“Well, I’ll be safe then, if the Bhutanese army comes looking for soldiers,” Grant said. He added a smile so the monk who had just saved his life wouldn’t think him rude. But really, he thought, I need time alone to work through my predicament.

“You are a student?” Kinley asked.

“Grad school. I’m ABD, sorry, all but—”

“Dissertation,” Kinley added. “I spent some time in a Western university.”

Grant raised his eyebrows. “Well, that explains the accent. Which one?”

“When I was a young monk, I often asked questions my elders felt were out of place. Spent quite a few hours in extra cleanup duty. The senior monk suggested to my parents that my taking a break from the monastery would be better for everyone. Fortunately, I earned the highest marks in my class and was given the rare opportunity to attend Oxford on scholarship.”

“Oxford? Impressive.” This gentle monk who had saved his life was also a scholar?

Kinley shrugged. “Once I finished, I returned to Bhutan and to monastic life. And you? You didn’t travel to the East on a spiritual quest?”

Grant shook his head. “My PhD is in religious studies, but my interests are strictly academic—historical.” Unlike my father’s, he thought. Grant’s sole regret concerning his father’s death was that he hadn’t had the opportunity to prove to him the many ways in which the preacher was wrong where religion was concerned.

“You believe that the nature of religion lies in history?”

Grant’s eyelids were becoming heavy from the effects of the doctor’s tea, but he willed them open. His body wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but this Oxford-educated monk intrigued him. “I’m interested in the early development of Christianity during the first century, and”—he hesitated for a moment as he pondered how to phrase the next part—“how contact with other cultures may have influenced this development.”

“What kind of influence?”

“I’ve been tracking several apocryphal stories.” Grant remembered his promise to himself not to reveal too much. In spite of Kinley’s Western education, Grant knew that the culture of these monasteries was insular and cautious of outside disruptions. Finding what he was seeking would certainly cause a disruption. He decided to use an example from his first trip to India, rather than his most recent. “For example, some evidence suggests that in fifty-two AD, twenty years after the death of Jesus, the apostle Thomas sailed to India. A small Christian community on the coast in Kerala traces its founding to Thomas and the several churches he established before he was martyred.”

“Have you found what you came for?”

Grant shook his head. “I’m still missing a key piece of my research, which is why I’m ABD.” He closed his eyes, giving in to the weight of his eyelids.

Kinley rose from the bed. “Sometimes we find not what we are looking for, but what we should be looking for.”

Through closed eyes Grant noted that the pain was fading from his body. Whatever was in the tea was working. He heard Kinley’s voice as if from a distance. “And I wish you good fortune on your search for the story of Issa.”

Grant’s eyes snapped open.

The monk responded to the look of shock that Grant knew was plastered over his face. “You spoke aloud at night during your period of unconsciousness. Gave us quite a fright at times.”

Grant’s pulse quickened. How much did I say? He’d planned to reveal that name carefully, especially after the monks at Himis clammed up at the mere mention of the Indian saint.

“Ah, yes,” Kinley continued, “the legend of a boy on a journey through India seeking answers to his questions, much like you.”

Grant forced his face to relax. “You know the story of Issa?”

“Rest now. Karma’s medicine will help you sleep until tomorrow.” Kinley bowed from his waist and left the room in a flurry of orange robes. His apprentice, who had been standing so quietly in the center of the room that Grant had forgotten he was still there, followed him out.

Grant wanted to call after Kinley. Did the monk know the importance of the Issa story, that it could answer one of Christianity’s great mysteries? A mystery that would challenge everyone’s assumptions of how the religion came to be. Could it be possible that the evidence he’d been searching for—the evidence that his colleagues at Emory didn’t believe existed—was here in this very monastery? Despite the flurry of questions swirling in his mind, the narcotic effects of the tea finally won the battle, and Grant slipped into unconsciousness.