The Watermill Read online

  About the Book

  Ranging from remote provinces in China and Cambodia to pre- and post-war Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iraq and Iran, and Indigenous and present-day Melbourne, Arnold Zable’s quartet of stories depicts the ebbs and flows of trauma and healing, memory and forgetting, the ancient and the contemporary. And ever-recurring journeys in search of belonging.

  To Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, Wurundjeri elder and to Zahra Shohani, 1994–2001

  Improvement makes straight roads,

  but the crooked roads without

  improvement are roads of genius.

  William Blake

  The faintest ink is more powerful

  than the strongest memory.

  Chinese proverb

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  The Watermill

  The Ballad of Keo Narom

  Republic of the Stateless

  Where We Meet

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright page

  I ask N to accompany me to the watermill as interpreter. The miller invites us inside and places the kettle on the coal stove. A boy, stick in hand, urges a pig onwards; a farmer leads a bullock by its tether. The images are each framed by the doorway for a moment.

  Tell the miller, I say, that I’m leaving and I want to thank him for the many hours I’ve spent here.

  Tell the foreigner, the miller replies, that I want him to write a couplet that sums up our many conversations.

  I am startled by the miller’s request; due to our language differences, barely a word has passed between us.

  N would translate the couplet and paint the characters, in black ink on red banners, as I had seen them on the doorways of homes in towns and hamlets throughout the province: the heading, horizontal, above the lintel, and the two lines, vertical on each side of the doorway,

  I spend hours trying to compose lines that match the task the miller has set me. The couplet is an exacting art form, an exercise in compressed language. What I hope to say extends far beyond the times I have spent at the watermill.

  I want it to capture the passing of the seasons, the people I have met, and my encounters since I first arrived in Huaxi, a hamlet in Guizhou Province, Southwest China, in mid-September 1984, after a two-day journey by train from Beijing.

  I awoke on the second morning to farmers working in the rain, thigh-deep in flooded paddies. Solitary figures lumbered up mountain paths, cloaked in rain-capes. Rejuvenated streams burst down steep inclines, and ducks swam in swollen rivers. I was met by officials at Guiyang Station, and driven the final stretch to Guizhou Agricultural College, where I was to teach English to agricultural scientists, and conduct seminars for teachers in the language department. The red identity card the authorities issued had me grandly titled ‘foreign expert’.

  The college was a world unto itself, the campus located on a rise above the town. Late afternoon, after the day’s work was over, I descended a road that ran past workers’ cottages, student dormitories and staff apartment blocks into the countryside.

  It was autumn when I first set out on the walks. Chilli peppers, corn and grains of rice lay drying on roadsides and in village courtyards in swathes of red, yellow and orange. Terraced paddies rose above fields of yellow rape flowers. Entire fields were given over to plots of vegetables; all was ripe, ready for reaping.

  I found alternative routes and became a familiar figure in the hamlets of the Miao and Buyi people, masters in the art of terracing. They invited me into their homes for toasts of maotai, a spirit native to Guizhou Province. Ganbei. Drink up, they said. I was a novelty, a solitary walker, one of the few foreigners to work in the province in decades.

  Whatever route I took, I found my way to a stone bridge straddling the Huaxi River. In the middle of the bridge stood a watermill, and beside it a single willow wreathed by leaf-fall. The miller invited me in and placed a kettle on the coal stove. He brought the water to the boil, steeped the tea, and when it was done poured it into mugs. He handed one to me, and settled back on a stool with the other.

  From time to time a horse-drawn cart clattered past. Women jogged by, balancing tubs on bamboo poles slung across their shoulders. Farmers delivered sacks of grain, which the miller added to those stacked beside the chute leading to the grinding stone. Once done he returned to his stool, rekindled his long-stemmed pipe and continued smoking.

  We sat in silence, broken by the laughter of children at play in the river, and the splash of buffalos lazing in the shallows. And all the while, beneath our feet, the steady beat of the waterwheel: Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. Round and round, an endless churning.

  China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution. As I got to know them, some of my students, aged from eighteen to seventy, would come at night to my apartment and tell me of the trials they had endured during that era.

  The country had descended into mass psychosis led by an ageing potentate clinging to power. Chaos engulfed the land, and with it that human capacity for slander and recrimination, bullying and betrayal. Old scores and vendettas were settled many times over, as faction fought faction and the Red Guards roamed the countryside quoting the homilies of their self-appointed Great Helmsman.

  The students had been assigned to years of labour in rural areas. Many saw their parents humiliated, imprisoned and exiled to distant farmlands. Loudspeakers resounded with slogans and denunciations. Bad elements, rich farmers, landlords, counter-revolutionaries and right-wingers were the five ‘black categories’—with capitalist roaders, traitors and foreign agents the perpetrators of additional felonies. Intellectuals completed the roll call as the ‘Stinking Ninth’.

  The denounced were paraded in the streets and forced to kneel for hours. Placards were hung from their necks. Dunces’ hats perched on their heads. Mobs beat them and jeered as they performed the loyalty dance: Chairman Mao is the red sun in our heart, they chanted as they tore apart the lives of former classmates, colleagues and comrades.

  The fate of one student embodied the madness. N was a pensive man in his mid-twenties, forever questioning, seeking to fathom life’s mysteries. He chose his words carefully, weighing his thoughts before releasing them. We were all caught up in it, he said. Sooner or later we stepped into the quicksand and turned on each other. Once in, there was no way out.

  N’s father worshipped Mao and was an ardent supporter of revolution. A Red Army soldier in the 1940s, he studied law after liberation and rose to a prominent position in the bureau of public security. He was a decent man, N insists, and he had faith. He followed Mao’s injunctions and denounced the cadres he claimed were corrupt. Inevitably, the wheel turned, the accuser became the accused, and the interrogator the victim. N’s father was denounced and imprisoned.

  A teenage member of the Red Guard, N fell from grace after his father was arrested. He was hounded by classmates, harassed and bullied. Cut off from his father, he was reared by his grandmother. A kindly woman, she was fiercely protective of her grandchild. She was his one constant as the country spiralled into collective madness. Be kind, she told him. But to be kind is not enough, she added. You must be strong if you are to withstand life’s fluctuating fortunes.

  As a child, N was shy and withdrawn. He dreamt of becoming a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. He was enthralled by films depicting its exploits. He imagined giving up his life on the battlefield and his deeds being known far and wide by the people.

  After his father was imprisoned, books became N’s solace. He read late into the night, furtively, so as not to arouse suspicion. He developed a passion for ideas, and sought out thinkers and philosophers. He read Rousseau, Voltaire, Goethe and Hegel in Chinese translation, a
nd he came to believe that the writers’ craft was forged in hardship. He read Lu Xun, and in his measured prose and subversive stories he found a mentor. He read the Tang and Song dynasty poets and identified with their love of solitude. He read Gorky, Dickens and Hugo and became addicted to novels.

  The characters remained in his mind long after he finished reading. They embodied the turmoil he saw about him. Their efforts to make sense of life helped him deal with the imprisonment of his father. His ambitions shifted. He hoped that one day he would become a writer.

  Every day, dawn till dusk, the farmers continued to gather the harvest, and in the late afternoons I walked, finding new tracks and retracing familiar ones, making my way to the bridge to sit with the miller; and always the wordless greeting, the kettle on the stove, and the hiss of steam rising, demanding attention like a whining infant. And the two of us, hands warmed by our mugs, seated side by side, in silence.

  I would leave the mill in the evening, and make my way beside the river past darkening fields to the town. The streets were crowded. Teams of bullock-drawn carts moved by. Jeeps and trucks wove through the traffic. Weary work-horses hauled carts weighed down with rocks, as the daily roadworks and building construction extended beyond nightfall. Brigades of labourers worked by lamplight in the main street, digging foundations.

  Alleys and courtyards lined with cottages gave way to enclaves of apartment blocks, their drabness relieved by pot plants on windowsills and balconies, and the occasional burst of sunflowers. At roadside food stalls and in tea houses, I snacked on slices of fried bean curd filled with hot spices. It was often long dark by the time I arrived back at my campus apartment.

  For months on end, seven days a week, bent over in rain, wind and sun, the farmers cleared the fields of rice and corn, sunflowers and rape, draining the fields of their colour. Then it was over, the paddies and fields reduced to dirt and stubble strewn with hayricks. Flocks of geese pecked at leftover grain under the watchful eyes of their keepers. The rice was threshed, husked and bagged. The last stalks of grain lay tied in bundles, and the final yields were ferried from the fields in handcarts and horse-drawn wagons.

  It had been a good harvest. The village larders were well stocked. Red chilli peppers dried in the courtyards. Strings of garlic and corn hung from the roof beams. Pumpkins, spread out on the grey tiled roofs, had turned from green to gold, fully ripened. Bundles of hay were stored in the rafters, in courtyards, and heaped around tree trunks, briquettes stacked in readiness for winter.

  A collective sigh settled on the valley. The farmers were still out there, but working at a slower pace: hoeing, digging and ploughing fields for the winter planting. Many fields lay fallow.

  N was a frequent guest in my apartment in the cooler nights. He preferred visiting late. His mind was sharpened, he said, by the sense that outside darkness had long fallen. His talk often turned to his early years.

  As a child, he was a dreamer. The countryside spoke to him. In his eyes, the stalks of sorghum were nodding their heads and extending their greetings. The rivers, cut deep into the valleys, were pathways to other worlds, sprung from mysterious sources. He roamed the fields, stole into orchards, ate his fill of fruit, and returned home at dusk with his stomach bloated. His grandmother scolded him for overeating.

  N’s mother was too busy for his persistent questions. But his grandmother listened to him with patience. Her pleasure showed in her eyes, and her concern was reflected in the furrows on her forehead. She called him ‘my little treasure’ and told him stories of ghosts and ogres, and the rise and fall of dynasties, as they sat by the open doorway on summer nights and by the coal stove in winter. She recalled her tumultuous years as a young revolutionary, but sidestepped the current storms brewing about her.

  When a funeral procession passed the doorway, N took fright at the sight of the corpse and the sombre faces of the mourners. Why do we die? he asked. Don’t worry, she replied. The wheel of life keeps turning. Life gives way to death, and death paves the way for renewal. You have a long and bright future.

  The wheel turned. The Cultural Revolution was over. Mao was dead and the Gang of Four imprisoned. At party gatherings cadres pronounced the new slogans. Extreme Leftists were out, and the Four Modernisations defined the future. After years of self-imposed isolation, the doors of an empire were opening.

  N seized his opportunity. His father remained in prison, and N had assumed the role of family provider. He wanted to be of use to the farmers who worked the terraces above his native village. He studied agriculture, became a research scientist and a teacher of biology and horticulture. He continued his reading and contemplation, and regularly visited his father in prison.

  The seasons were turning, the chill intensified, and still I walked to the watermill. I walked as the countryside sank under winter mists and the mountains vanished beneath cloud and drizzle. The willow beside the mill was now bare. Day after day the cloud persisted. I sat beside the miller as the rain beat on the tiled roof, veiling the view from the open doorway. The cold sharpened the senses and the mill interior smelt of damp and hessian.

  I headed back to town on muddied pathways. The riverbanks were breaking and the air was thick with the smoke of home fires. Farmers hurried by under plastic sheets. A hunchbacked woman sat between newly ploughed furrows under an umbrella, knitting.

  In the town, boys dragged wooden carts heavy with briquettes. Their faces were smeared with coal and their clothes caked with coal dust. Steam rose from woks and stoves. Stallholders in padded jackets remained at work after dark, selling vegetables and herbs, sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I retreated to the tea houses and surveyed the night through the windows and doorways.

  And still I walked. Walked until the skies began to crack open. Walked as the rains deluged fields and paddies and turned placid streams into torrents. The hamlets retreated into hibernation, and smoke curled, day and night, from the chimneys. The earth was soaked and the paths dotted with puddles. With each passing day, the hours of darkness lengthened with the approach of the winter solstice.

  And through it all, I continued my sojourns at the mill, and through it all the grinding stone continued turning. It could be seen beneath the chute, crushing the harvest into flour, taming my obsessive thoughts into stillness, and the busyness of the day into a quiet punctuated by the beat of the wheel. Round and round, an endless turning.

  The first signs of the new season appeared with the preparations for the Spring Festival. People emerged from their rooms and apartments, weaned from the coal stoves they had huddled around on winter evenings. Artisans and tradesmen took their work back into the streets and alleys, and the farmers returned to the fields to harvest the winter crops and prepare the earth for the spring planting.

  The smoke of incense rose from family altars and scented the alleys. Lanterns, fashioned as fish and lions, geometric shapes and dragons, trailed from lintels and balconies. Processions of dragons snaked out into the countryside. Exploding crackers marked the beginning of the festive break before a season of back-breaking labour returned in earnest.

  Grandmother, why do people fire so many crackers? N asked. My treasure, the sound of crackers can keep ghosts from the door and drive bad luck away, she answered.

  The entire country was on the move, returning home for the Spring Festival. I travelled by train with two of my students, N and Q, on the first leg of a three-week journey. We went deep into areas off limits to foreigners. My work card acted as passport.

  The carriages were packed with soldiers on leave, farmers smoking hookahs and city workers with their luggage bulging with food and presents. Students in Mao suits sat alongside more daring youths dressed in jeans and leather jackets. Men sat in the aisles, playing cards; children ran wherever they found space, buoyed by a sense of anticipation. At each station, there were joyous reunions and welcomes.

  The train disappeared into tunnels blasted through mountainsides, the entries guarded by soldiers. Mountain passes gave w
ay to plains of grazing horses and cattle. Water poured from market-stall awnings and the eaves of thatched homes where children sat in the doorways, crouched over exercise books. Other children propelled tyres through the mud, sending them scuttling down steep pathways.

  At each break in the rain, farmers returned to the fields and road workers returned to mixing cement, digging ditches, crushing rock and sifting stone—attacking the mountain with mattocks and mallets, shovels and sledgehammers.

  N was more animated than I had ever seen him. He pointed out familiar valleys, and hillsides where stones marked the burial places of ancestors. He told of caves in the earth beneath us, linked by networks of tunnels breaking out into chambers named Cloud Cave, Ballroom, Music Hall. The caves once housed entire families.

  We passed hamlets perched on mountain heights and scattered over plateaus and valleys. In one of those hamlets N’s grandmother had told her stories. N recounts them now—tales of wise generals and profligate courtiers and of reclusive poets who, millennia ago, retreated to mountain hideaways. Of Tang dynasty poet Han Shan who roamed the peaks alone and carved his poems on bamboo and boulders, temple walls and pavilions.

  Some say Han Shan lived in the seventh century. Some say he lived in the eighth, others the ninth. He lived as a recluse in a cliff-side cave with a rock overhang as balcony, a thin layer of grass as his sleeping mat and a stone as pillow. Some say he lived to one hundred and twenty, and others doubt he ever existed.

  Han Shan means Cold Mountain, says N. Han Shan lived far from here, but I think of him whenever I travel through mountain country. It is said that he had two sidekicks: Feng-kan, Big Stick; and Shih-te, Pickup.

  Feng-kan was over six foot tall. And Shih-te was a ten-year-old boy when Han Shan found him abandoned and took him to a mountain monastery. He was assigned to work in the kitchen, while Feng-kan spent his days in a temple room, hulling rice and chanting scriptures. The three became close friends. They played pranks and made fun of Buddhist and Taoist teachings, even though they practised them.