Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron Page B

top to bottom, nobody escaped–not the high officials, nor Party members, nor the Living Buddha, nor ordinary workers. All China, mad! And now I put that time out of my mind.’ He plucks an imaginary worm from his forehead. ‘I just forget it.’
    I do not know if this forgiveness stems from Buddhist compassion or from something else. The Cultural Revolution was blamed on a handful of conspirators–the so-called Gang of Four–then the country set about forgetting. Secretly the terriblefault-line of the past ran through all society–through every work unit, every village, sometimes every family–but silence closed over it.
    As I talk with the Living Buddha, his forgiveness touches me with paradoxical misgiving. I realise I want anger, I want recrimination and failure to understand. In Western dogma psychic health depends on acknowledgement of the past, on coming to terms. Remembrance is catharsis. But to the Cultural Revolution, in the end, almost everybody fell victim, everybody suffered. Perhaps to recall what you did, or what was done, is to remember another person, in another existence. And to choose forgetfulness is to choose life.
     
    My bus winds up into the land of carved dust. The hills circle and uncoil around us, then level out into a high valley where a tributary of the Yellow River has smoothed its bed to a broken pavement. Out of the scattered villages the bus fills up with Muslim Hui, their women wimpled in black or dark green lace; and soon the towns are thronged with their high white caps, as if thousands of chefs were inexplicably wheeling bicycles and handcarts through the streets. As we go west, the mosque minarets, where no muezzin is allowed to call, taper above the roofs in fantastical belvederes and colonettes, or stand like filigreed toys along the heights which shadow us to Labrang.
    Then suddenly, beyond Linxia, the loess hills have gone, and our valley steepens into stone. A young monk climbs on board, and smiling Tibetan herdsmen in dented felt hats. The shoulders of unseen mountains drop towards us out of the clouds. Once some police stop the bus and we are all emptied on to the verge while a man sprays disinfectant over the floor. The SARS virus has erupted in Xian to our east. The leftover Chinese hook on white masks. The Tibetans go on smiling.
    Soon we are travelling up a steep, misty corridor. The river flows faster, purer, the colour of pale jade. The mountains close in. We have crossed a border unmarked by any map, already infringing onthe plateaux of Tibet. The Buddhist stupas sit like nipples on the hills, while prayer-flags fly from the house courtyards and rustle over cairns in the pastures. Here and there, set far up a hillside, the tiered roofs of a monastery cascade to white walls. Then the road disintegrates to a gravel track. In the dusk the slopes are stamped with the shapes of sleeping yaks, and snow is falling in a soft, thin silence.
    I disembark into the night and cold of Labrang. I am still more than three hundred miles from the Tibetan frontier. Lights fade down the street where Hui and Chinese shops have settled beside the monastery town beyond. My feet crunch over the snow, seeming light and lonely, and from somewhere in the darkness ahead–like an old god clearing his throat–sounds the braying of a horn. Then a familiar elation wells up: the childlike anticipation of entering the unknown, some perfect otherness. Your body lightens and tingles. The night fills up with half-imagined buildings, voices you do not understand. The experience is inseparable from solitude and a vestigial fear, because you don’t know where the road will end, who will be there.
    As it is, the street empties and I cross a rubbish-filled dyke into the unlit Buddhist quarter, and turn by chance into the monastery guesthouse. It is a courtyard of naked rooms, frosty with trees. Besides a caretaker, I glimpse only the herdsmen pilgrims lumbering from door to door, huge against the snow in