The Year of Rice and Salt

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.

So he smiled at their unfounded equanimity, and said, 'But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.'

A young Aozhani woman, come here like so many others did from all around the world, to study agriculture with the old adepts at the college, said, 'But since we are all reincarnated anyway, is death really such a catastrophe?'

Bao felt himself take a long breath. Like most scientifically educated people, he did not believe in reincarnation. It was clearly just a story, something out of the old religions. But still how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions? How to account for that experience at the Gold Gate, holding his granddaughter aloft?