Bird Read online

  Yes, I am starting now?

  Okay. My name is Lama Dorje Rinpoche. [coughs]

  This is important story. The three of us walk a very long way to be together. Across Russia. Across Tibet. That is our karma. I tell you about it so you all know about our Russian movie star princess. She helps start our monastery. Lama Gyatsho was Anna’s teacher. My teacher also. Lama Gyatsho just ordinary monk, but actually, extraordinary. Many realisations. Very strong karmic connection between Anna and myself to share a guru. The qualities of the teacher cannot be forgotten. Milarepa have Marpa, Anna have Lama Gyatsho. So, if Anna is enlightened in one lifetime, or get super quick ticket to the pure realm, need to consider it is the gift of the teacher to the student.

  [more coughing] Okay. [muffled offer of water in the background] No, that’s fine. Off we go now. Anna liked to say that. Let’s go!

  We were driven from our land. Many great teachers tortured and killed. They shame the monks and nuns; hold guns to their head and force them to break precepts. They imprisoned their bodies and destroyed their sacred objects. But their minds could not be touched.

  I was young, maybe twelve years old, but I walked through passes in the snow. Many of us died walking. In India we were put into camps. In theory not prisoners, but still, pretty like a prison. Very like that. South India hot, as you know. Many get sick and die there too. Fifty, seventy monks in very small space. Even sleeping on the veranda. Barbed wire, ditches. Very crowded, something like fifteen hundred monks altogether. I studied sutra. Also studied tantra. I received teachings from teachers about Buddhist philosophy so was still able to generate positive imprint at that time. Very important. But also, play like a child, that important too. But I go too fast.

  I was born in 1946. That the same time Anna walking through Europe, I think. I was called Ang-Pasang because to my mother I was precious, because I was born on a Friday. I was born in the shadow of a mountain, same place where one time a great lama live in a cave. From very small child, I tried to crawl up the path that led to the cave. My mother found me there every time, and when she carried me back to the village I cried. How to explain? Each time a baby falls over, he loses memories of his previous life. I was a tiny boy who stumbled all the time. It was important I make people understand soon, before my past life slipped away from me.

  One day, when Mother came for me, I spoke my first words: ‘I have lived here before.’ Soon after, they call family of the previous lama, want to show me his possessions. The family not so happy about that. They offer up an old sheepskin coat here, old rice bowl there. I always pick the correct object but the family slow to accept who I am. So, complicated. But in the end, no way of hiding the truth. Soon I was known as Lama Phu-Dorje Rinpoche. Phu means truth, Dorje means lightning bolt and Rinpoche means precious teacher.

  I go to school very young, so of course I miss my mother. Instead of learning the alphabet I sneak away from class and run home, as fast as water falling over rocks. So that was why my uncle carried me to a monastery, two days walking, over a valley where there were many avalanches, to a place I could not return home from. When I was eight years old, my uncle took me even further away, into the land called Tibet. That walk took many months. Sometimes we walk through pine forests, sometimes over bare earth. At night we watch the stars and the moon and I think of my mother. She watched the same sky also. One night I asked my uncle if the sky had a beginning and my uncle told me that the sky was beginningless, like mind stream.

  In Tibet I found the man I wanted to be my first teacher, a monk call Karma. Tell my uncle I am staying in Tibet, not return home. He said I was too young to make up my mind, but still I refused to leave with him. Whenever my uncle picked me up I went flop, all heavy, too heavy to carry. He gave me precious robes, but I didn’t care about things like that. Then he beat me. I didn’t care about that either. My uncle was afraid my mother would be sad. Finally my uncle took me to the local judge. The judge ordered me to be locked in cell and my clothes taken. That was a test you see. I was very cold. Frozen. I was visited by wrathful deities, but I knew that that was part of the test and I must be brave. When the judge finally called me he ask if I understand it will be years until I see my family again. I tell the judge the truth: dharma sustains me now.

  Like I say, I am twelve years old when the time comes to leave Tibet. This was 1959. Only one mountain to cross to reach Bhutan, that didn’t seem so far, though I was very sad to leave Karma behind. But much worse than we imagined. Very wet, and we sink into the mud. We walked through the night so couldn’t be seen during the day. One day the snow fell so thick that the rocks were smothered and many of my friends die. Lying there under that rock I had a vision. I was seeing Karma’s throat cut from ear to ear and I felt it, like a pain in my own body, my own heart. I wondered if the aspect they called Lama Dorje Rinpoche was going to die also. Then I realised I would survive because I must spread the word of the Buddha in this lifetime. Later I hear that soldiers used Karma’s head as a football to make an example of him. He experienced much suffering. I was very sad when I hear that.

  At that time some of us developed the aspect of frostbite and our toes turned black. At the Bhutanese border, there were nomads and nomads sometimes spied for the Chinese but the nomads did not come out of their tents. An hour later we crossed into Bhutan.

  My plan was to go to Darjeeling but the head policeman at Buxa, in Bhutan, stopped me. I was invited to Delhi by a British nun, who has started a school and she invite many of the incarnate lamas there. When I was there I even had interview with the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He was lying down, but on a kind of chair, not on a bed. He wanted me to tell him about what it was like to walk from Tibet but he was very, very old. I don’t know if he could concentrate on my answers. I spent six months in Delhi, and it was at that time that I developed the aspect of illness: TB. First I caught smallpox and had to stay in the smallpox hospital and then go to the TB hospital. I cried for three days in that hospital. The reason I cried was, there was no opportunity to learn English. I had a great ambition to learn English. I think perhaps I have karma with people who speak this language.

  After six months I went back to Buxa. I spent much of that time learning English, but in a useless way, because I tried to collect and memorise English words the way we learn Tibetan texts. I once learned whole dictionary by heart. But what was the point of that? To learn words with no understanding? In any case, no opportunity to practise in Buxa.

  At Buxa, Geshe Rabten taught me meditation. I tried to do samatha meditation on bed. I tried to meditate one-pointedly on the silver cover of my Tibetan tea bowl but fall down when I tried that. Keep falling down so, after a while, I stopped. Then my teacher wanted me to receive teachings from Lama Gyatsho. I did not want to go and kept putting that off—this reason, that reason. I think perhaps you can relate to this? When very important thing is to happen it makes us frightened.

  One day my friend tricked me. We were just walking, for relaxation. My friend took me further and further away from the camp. When we came to a mango tree I said, ‘I want to go back,’ but he pushed, so I went little bit further. I keep stopping. He keep pushing. It was quite far to where Lama Gyatsho lived and when we got there I realised I had been tricked into meeting my teacher and now I had no offering. When you first make contact with the guru it is very important to perform the offerings correctly. So, bad feeling.

  On my first day I didn’t understand the teaching. Instead I thought, why couldn’t Lama Gyatsho teach more slowly? Then on the second day I understood a little better. Maybe because Lama Gyatsho had guided me in many lifetimes. So, even though I had no strong wish, there was a strong force, special karma, between Lama Gyatsho and myself. He is my guru. All the happiness of the past, present and future depends on the guru.

  Now I will tell you about Lama Gyatsho. His first name was Lama Khandro and he fought his way through bardo for a precious human rebirth. His soul entered the egg and sperm that joined after h
is chosen parents made love. He was reborn as the dawn broke and the moon set.

  His parents lived in Kham, in east of Tibet. He was very tiny boy, small enough to go under the bellies of the horses. Horses like him so very patient with him. Don’t kick him or anything like that. When he was old enough monks took him to see the horse he owned in his former life. That was when the monks see his old horse give him a kiss with whiskery nose. [kissing noise; laughter] They considered that their final sign.

  When he was six years old Lama Gyatsho walked to Lhasa to receive teachings. He got up before dawn and walked for six or seven hours, with only morning prayers for food. Delicious! [laughs] When camp was set up at lunch time he was given balls of barley we call tsampa, and salty butter tea. Thick as soup. I like it very much. You westerners often…[pttt pttt noise; laughter] Some days he cried because his feet so sore. He always asleep before dark then wake to watch the stars in the sky—the sky very big in Tibet, very beautiful—in the moments before morning comes.

  Before Gyatsho left on his journey one of the monks in Kham told him of monks who run so swiftly, so lightly, it is as if they are flying. They cover long distances in the blink of an eye but when they arrive, their breathing normal. No effort at all. Lama Gyatsho decided he want to fly too and some days he ran along the path, ahead of the monks and ponies, focus only on his feet, the movement. Like he was nothing more than that pair of feet. Older monks laugh as they watch him run, knowing he will soon collapse. Very tired. By the time they catch up with him he is lying on the ground thumping his fists. Very angry boy. After a few days of that one of the older monks finally taking pity on him and say, ‘Does your anger help you run?’

  Lama Gyatsho shake head.

  ‘Look,’ the monk points at a cloud the wind is chasing across the sky. ‘Soon your anger will pass, as that cloud will pass over the sun.’ Lama Gyatsho feels the cool of sun slipping behind a cloud; stares at it until dazzled by the sun. He did not learn to fly, but on that journey experience moments of peace and did not notice time passing.

  Anyway, I talk too much. [pause. Sound of tea being drunk] After all these years, and all this walking, Lama Gyatsho and I go to Darjeeling. One day we were studying very important texts, texts for the realising of emptiness, and then there was a knock on our door. It was a monk who lived there at Ghoom Monastery with us and he said our American friend was here. We had no American friends, not yet, but I felt…yes, this person might be a friend to us in some way. That was Anna. We went outside to meet our new friend and she looked like the movie stars we had seen in magazines. She came into our lives just like that. Our first American student. Lama Gyatsho asked her if she want some tea. Like she was an old friend and he was expecting to see her. But actually, he was very surprised. We both very surprised.

  Eleanor

  Your eyes are heavy, as if outlined / With thick, black

  India ink

  It didn’t take Anna long to find a husband and it didn’t take her long to lose him. What happened was this: when Max Goldberg first saw Anna on the stage at Bergs, she stood in a full-length fitted black-bead dress, with her hair piled high, singing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’; her singing voice was halting, heavily accented and whispery, it made you want to lean in close. Max wanted to lean in close; he approached her after the song, took her hand and lifted it to his lips. ‘Enchanted,’ he said, making such a performance of introducing himself that Anna almost laughed at him. But he was good looking and charming and he told Anna he was a film producer. Then, after two weeks of cocktail bars, restaurants and parties, he asked her to marry him. It was all so simple: Anna felt like she was still in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  ‘Don’t Miss Lee and Daddy get married and live happily ever after?’ Anna said to me, when I told her I thought it was too soon. ‘It’s important to believe in happy endings.’

  ‘I thought you thought they were corny,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think happy endings were your line.’

  I was trying to pretend my concern was that Anna make the right decision, though in truth the thought of losing her broke my heart. ‘Have you slept with him?’

  ‘No,’ Anna looked uncertain for a moment. ‘Max thinks I am too much of a lady.’

  I burst out laughing. Anna tried to look stern for a moment then began to laugh as well. ‘Don’t be so worried, darling. Max and I will just, how do you say it? Wing it. Max and I will just wing it.’

  Three months later Anna arranged to meet me at the back of Canter’s new restaurant. It was a sea of vinyl, glass and laminex. A place you could get lost in. She turned up an hour late, after I’d eaten and just as I was about to leave. She was wearing a sky blue dress and five small, dark bruises on her upper arm. She was also wearing her shades indoors, and had a pronounced limp.

  ‘I’m sorry I am so late,’ Anna said, leaving her sunglasses on, despite the dim light, as she surveyed the new booths and long counters. ‘I like this very much. It is very modern. Apparently it is open twenty-four hours a day now.’ Then she took off her glasses and let me look at her swollen eyelid; the blue-black that shadowed her eye.

  ‘Anna?’

  June returned with menus. She took one look at Anna, and said, ‘Leave him. Now, what’ll you have?’

  ‘I will, darling,’ Anna said. ‘Have you eaten, Ellie?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Okay. Give me a coffee and plain omelette.’ It was the most lacklustre order I ever saw Anna make.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Actually, it was a kind of relief, you know? He is a shit. In my heart I have known for some time. Now I have the proof. For me, for you, for everyone to see. But what the heck. He gave me a big rock. I am a very lucky girl.’

  Anna waved her engagement ring at me. It sat, too tight on her finger, under the wedding band. I had seen this black humour of Anna’s before. It wasn’t funny.

  ‘And your foot?’

  Anna moved her leg to one side so I could see her swollen ankle and the bruised foot she had pushed into her grey pumps. ‘It was quite hard to get my foot in the shoe, actually,’ was all she said. Then the food arrived and I gave Anna a few moments to eat before asking: ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘After the club the other night he saw me talking to Joe-Joe, you know. And he had too much to drink—what’s new?—and when we are driving home he tells me I am sleeping with Joe-Joe, and I tell him he is being ridiculous. And then he slams his foot over mine, pushing it into the brake. That is how…’ she gestured down vaguely, ‘I got the foot. And I swerve to a stop, just miss a tree and when I am sitting there he grabs the back of my head,’ she reached behind and grabbed her hair in a scruff with a sudden, violent gesture, ‘and he goes like this. Into the steering wheel. Smash, again. Like that. So that is how I got the eye. And he shakes me for some time—that is the arms. So there. All bruises accounted for.’ Anna recounted this all in a slow, cold voice.

  ‘So do you have a thing with Joe-Joe?’

  ‘Well, you know,’ she avoided my gaze. ‘But that is not the reason. Just an excuse.’

  ‘So what is the reason?’ I asked.

  ‘My child,’ Anna said. ‘Yesterday I tell him I am with child.’

  After Anna’s abortion the ‘doctor’ left her unconscious in a supermarket car park off La Brea. She was meant to come straight to my apartment after she was done but when she was three hours late I drove to the place where she’d met the doctor earlier that morning and found her lying on the back seat of her car with a blanket thrown over her. For a moment I thought she was dead and I gasped with relief when she responded to my touch.

  ‘Don’t worry I am just resting,’ she shook herself out of her stupor and tried to smile at me. ‘Oh!’ she looked down, ‘there is blood everywhere. It is disgusting. I have not been here so long so there is no big problem, darling. I am late because he leaves me two hours waiting this morning. Then when he gets here he is wearing some ugly safari suit. “Nice outfit,” I say to him. “What, we are go
ing on a fucking vacation or something?” and he says, “Sure, just as soon as you give me that four hundred bucks I’m off to Mexico.” Funny guy. We drive for half an hour, maybe more, and then he gets me to pull up in a driveway somewhere south of Marina Del Rey. I do not know that area so well. When we walk in the place has no furniture except a table in the front room with newspaper spread underneath it. There are heavy curtains pulled across the window. Mr Safari Suit tells me to get up on the table and then he’s, you know, trying to take my panties off without giving me a thing. Nothing for the pain I mean. So I go to the bathroom and take some…some painkiller I have organised for myself. Just in case. Maybe I took a bit much because then I don’t remember a thing until, well, here I am. I think I should sell the car. Do you think I should sell the car? The seats…ruined.’

  ‘Shh,’ I touched her gently on the arm. She was chatting so manically she was making me nervous. ‘It’s okay now. And you are welcome to move back with me. Any time.’

  ‘I think I should try,’ she said, ‘to make things work with Max.’

  If she tried she didn’t try hard. It wasn’t long before Anna was going out most nights and I was going with her. I’d say I was glad we’d gone back to being friends again, the way we used to be when we lived together, but to be honest things weren’t the same at all. Being with Anna had always made me feel special. She had preferred my company to the company of anyone else and laughed at all my jokes. She waved away my doubts about my ordinariness with a flourish of those elegant long-fingered hands.

  ‘You have class, darling.’ That is what Anna used to say whenever I worried about how others might see me, though the truth was that my body would not be in fashion until the end of the sixties and by that stage I would no longer care. I used to fuss with my hair for hours before I went out, but there was nothing I could do to change the fact that it was too fine to stay up for any length of time without an entire can of hairspray. I was all bumps and bones beside Anna’s curves. And now, it seemed, Anna was using those curves against me. If I was spoken to by a man, she insinuated herself between us, standing so close that I would be forced to take a step back. At first I thought I was imagining things but as the men flocked around her, it became clear that I wasn’t. I’d never experienced jealousy before. Now I was crippled by it.