Читать книгу The Ends of Kinship - Sienna R. Craig - Страница 18

In the beginning, water. Remember, what are now mountains was once sea. After this, Tibetans describe a coupling of monkey and ogress. He sought crags, a place to cultivate mind. But place breeds desire. She was crag, rock, plain; forest, river, peak. Soon, she birthed the multiples. Later, they will say the bodhisattva of compassion engineered this union, that Buddhism tamed the wildness of a place once known as feminine ground. Over time, bodies made peace with the lightness of air, the thinness of atmosphere. Local biologies hold many possibilities for survival. Still, genetic forgetting happens quickly in the lowlands.

I listen to hundreds of women recount reproductive histories—songs of innocence and experience. Calculations overwhelm: thirteen pregnancies, six living children; eight pregnancies, two miscarriages, a stillbirth, four living children; more rarely, five pregnancies, five living children. A friend has five children but had nine pregnancies. The twins died. A third child succumbed after a seemingly endless labor that my friend was lucky to have survived. She bore three more pregnancies, two more children. The names of her children come to me easily. I know each of them. But, that summer, I learn the ghost numbers. It takes a different kind of asking.

After many tries, we fail to read the pulse of an ancient woman wearing Chinese Ray-Bans, as fake as she is real. Is it blood coursing through her, or memory? The grandfather she calls “husband” does not speak. He spins his upright prayer wheel, sinks into a natty carpet. Children, near a dozen born, fade into the revelation that this woman has spent nigh eight years, a century of months, three thousand days spinning the wheel of blood and bone, waiting for a blessed gasp: breath to last beyond the present; breath thick with possibility; breath seared by loss.

A night of sickness in a Lhasa bathroom. Then, the ultrasound conveyed what I could already picture: watery womb, fuzzy tangle of new life. I carry her across the wrinkle of a year. Before I leave the high country, a doctor predicts she will be “big and dumb,” karmic payback for my remaining in the mountains. My body tells different stories. Still, her warning nestles in. She has mopped up so much death. My labor unfolds in a hospital on the other side of the world. Forty hours can be a lifetime. Here, forty hours might have taken my life.