this too

THE THIRD MONK V

I didn't know, as we sat round the kitchen table, after Jean-Paul and his daughters banged back in again at midday, that I'd come home and would flourish here. But I saw that I'd stepped into a picture with brighter colours, from Lowry to Matisse, that these people were as sad and frail as any, but vivid and warm as the flowers outside in the sunshine and the wonderful food on our plates.

Jean-Paul fired out one funny story after another, I remember, about his patients, to put us at our ease, and then Marielle, in a precocious three-year-old's way, told a long story with gestures about the maîtresse at her nursery school, and Marianne laughed a lot, still with her bright, younger face, and I was hearing the pungent accent of Jean-Paul's home, Marseille, and the endearing convolutions of a talkative young child's French, and feeling the sun on my back through the window, melting me, and hearing myself laugh too, as I hadn't for a while, hearing my own voice find its rhythm in another language - another me.

When the plates were bare and her son had returned to work, Louise looked less stalwart, all of a sudden, her cheeks flushed and papery. Marianne touched her arm and murmured, 'have a rest, dear', and she left us to clear the meal. So Marianne washed and I dried, in the sunshine through the window, and we began the conversation we would continue for the next nine months.

She jangled off in the car again then, with the children, and I walked around the village square, surrounded by old stone house-fronts and yellow blossom on the slopes behind them, and sat down with the old men in the cafe to wait for my new employer. She was back in five minutes and ordering tea, a milk-less orange drink with a teabag string protruding from the cup, which I didn't remove that first time until much too late. if I was disturbed and intrigued and charmed, I can't think how she felt. Somewhat daunted, I imagine, by the pale, stolid, rather unforthcoming girl before her.

'You'll take Marielle and Laura to school and fetch them sometimes, I hope. It's very close.'

'Will you be at work?'

'I don't have a job', she looked down, then forced herself to look me in the eye. 'I've been ill, a dépression nerveuse. I'm much better now, but still... Louise has been here on and off for months during her treatment, but she's going home in a few days. She and Antoine retired last year to her village in the Alps, St-... [what was it's name? I forget. My god, could it have been St-Pierre?]. There's a house there - pretty ramshackle, but they don't seem to mind.'

'I don't have all that much experience with children', I faltered (thinking, nor with mental illness).

'Don't worry. We just need another pair of hands, another adult, someone kind in the house. I think you're kind.' Her eyes held mine.

'I don't know if I'm kind. I thought I was clever, but I seem to have screwed that up. I don't know what I am now.' A sense that somehow this halting admission was the right thing to say.

'You seem clever enough to me. Oxford University. And your French is excellent.'

'I'm a good mimic, that's all. if I don't watch it I'll start talking like Jean-Paul.'  She giggled. I could make her laugh, make her face light up. 'I love it, though. Speaking another language is magical. I feel like a different person. And I'm so happy to be here', looking around me, 'All this...'.

-------------------------------

Eek. I've been literally making this up as I went along. If it's to go any further, I have to do some serious thinking, about style and structure and the arc of the story (if there is enough of a story), and the interplay of past and present. And I'll have to research the locations and French post-'68 politics and culture - an ethos I remember vividly, but many details are forgotten. Is it worth the effort, as a learning exercise and just for the pleasure of it? Maybe, yes. Because the pleasure is intense. I've never written fiction, except for an unfinished short story once, on a week-long writing course, and I'm loving it. I was desperately keen to do NaNoWriMo this year - having lighted on this plot - and furious when  life intervened with all sorts of disruption and upset around the beginning of November. So perhaps, very slowly - more like a year than a month to write 50,000 words, on present form. Why not?

THE THIRD MONK IV

 

The year abroad for students of modern languages was just then, in the 1970s, becoming popular, but still frowned upon at my women's college ('Better not to break the rhythm. You'll lose your study habits, forget how to write an essay'). Although several of my closest friends had gone, to France and Spain and Germany and Italy, I'd weakly succombed to pressure and stayed for my third year in Oxford. Lonely and bored without my usual gang, I got into odd company, drank too much and suffered a breakdown of the precious study habits, pretty soon a breakdown of everything. By Christmas I'd been sent home in disgrace to my parents, the notion of a  'year out' suddenly everyone's idea of the best solution, the hope now that this would allow me to reconsider, pull myself together and return respectably for a final year's study and to obtain my degree.

My parents were not sympathetic. In fact they were aghast. On New Year's Eve my mother, after one too many sweet sherries at the neighbours', waved the breadknife under my nose and screamed that I had shamed her and she would kill us both (astonishing the emotions that run beneath the thin ice of mild conventionality). I had just enough energy and instinct for self-preservation to get out fast. Too late for a job teaching English, I found an au-pair post with a family in the South of France, the arrière-pays just inland from the Riviera. I arrived in early February as the mimosa was coming into bloom - the first experience, for a very Northern young person, of the Sunny South.

I went there with no expectations, wanting only to put a distance between myself and my mother in Manchester, my disappointed and disapproving tutor in Oxford (Dr Hicks. A scholar of French classical theatre; her sarcastic demolition of my essay-writing style has stood me in excellent stead, but she wasn't so good pastorally with tender, neurotic young women).

The journey then from the North of England to the South of France took the best part of two days. The train from Manchester to London, the boat-train from London to Newhaven, the slow ferry crossing with queues and wind and rain and bad food and drink, the longer train-ride from Dieppe to Paris - pretty tired of it all by now - and finally the overnight sleeper from Paris to Nice, and the waking, early next morning, to find the railway line following the coast, and hauling down the windows to gaze at the Mediterranean.

It was with a deep sense of unreality that I stumbled onto the station platform at Nice and stood waiting uncertainly until a tall, thin shadow arrived next to mine and a nervous woman's voice said, 'Kathy?', (Kattee, as I'd soon get used to being) 'You come with me. Je suis Marianne'.

I'd never seen anyone quite like her. She was long and skinny and quick, wearing tight high-heeled boots and a long, wide cloak in a dull orange colour which was also the colour of her bush of hair. Her eyes were bright and kind and nervous and young, but great violet half-moon hollows sat beneath them and her pale, freckled face was painfully thin, with lines from nose to chin. Had I not been so tired, I might have been alarmed. This was clearly not the bourgeoise housewife and mother I'd had in mind. I was mostly relieved, though, to be met and recognised and led to a car, a dusty, metallic-blue Renault 4 with a big dent in the passenger side.

I must have dozed, because I only half remember a slippy-slidey drive and glimpsing road signs with words like bretelle and péage that were not in my French vocabulary and hearing other words not in my vocabulary hurled by Marianne at fellow drivers. And words I did know: husband. dentist. daughters. two. mother-in-law. cancer - that made me sit up; we didn't say that at home, so baldly, without prevarication.

I came to again as we bumped through the narrow streets of a village and jerked to a halt in front of a tall stone house right on the square. As we hauled my luggage from the back of the car and up the steep steps, invisible hands opened the front door. Looking up, I saw no-one, but looking down saw two small people. They were lined up in the hallway to say hello, miniature but self-possessed. It was probably the only time I saw them both silent.

'C'est Kathy. You can tell her your names.'

'Marielle': a fragile frame and complexion like her mother. Glittering, too-wise eyes.

'Laura': a plump blue-eyed cherub. She was a year younger, I knew, but as tall as her sister. More like twins.

And behind them, smiling but impatient not to be late with the girls to nursery-school, 'Mon mari, Jean-Paul': a slight man with fierce eyes and a firm handshake and a wide, slightly rueful grin.

There may have been more talk and a tour of the house, but I only remember seeing it when I woke much later that morning to sunshine on my eyelids and the bedroom wall, and wandered down to the kitchen. Marianne, still in her voluminous orange cloak, was perched like a butterfly at the table and at the stove stood a stocky older woman, badly dressed, with steel-grey wispy hair in a bun and the same fierce eyes and wide grin - this must be Louise, Jean-Paul's mother, who had cancer and not much hope, I'd heard in the car. She had nothing of the invalid, though, solid and lively, talking fast and loudly and cooking up a storm. With a perfunctory wipe of oily, bloody hands on her apron, she wrapped her arms around me, kissing me on both cheeks. From the corner of my eye I saw Marianne smirk, not unkindly, as  I winced a little.

'La pauvre petite! Such a long journey! Coffee? Apéro? Well, perhaps not', as I stood silent and awkward, '.... you're English. Sit down, chérie, I've made you my pot-au-feu.'

'Louise is a great cook. You'll love it.' Full on, Marianne's smile transformed her face, no longer unsettlingly wan and nervous, but bright as her hair.

I did. I loved it. Love, in all its varieties, is my prevailing memory of the next nine months. My heart swelling to fill a space in my chest that I hadn't known was empty.

AT THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM

click on photos to enlarge

THE THIRD MONK III

I'm mopping the flagstoned corridor floor later that morning when a throat is cleared behind me and the third monk puts his hands together and bows slightly and edges past. Leaning in time-honoured fashion on my mop handle, I watch his back recede. Near the end of the corridor, his robe becomes a leather jacket and, looking down, I see not flowing skirts but the suggestion of a tiny girl bobbing and swinging from each of his hands. They turn the corner towards the meditation hall and I blink and laugh and carry on mopping. Later, though, I see them again.

After lunch, when the sun is already quite low over the distant peaks, I make it out of the monastery gate for a short walk into the larger secret domain around our small one. The road winds around and through the high valley, up in one direction to the pass and down in the other to the town a few miles away. I take the path up, slowly, slowly. A week from now my legs, cramped from long hours kneeling, will demand a vigorous hike. For now I only want to wander and absorb the place. So quiet it is. Too high, at this season, for sheep-bells or birdsong. No wind today in the trees and crannies. There is only the almost imperceptible buzz of the town echoing upwards - a feeling, perhaps, more than a sound.

My senses blunted by the city's racket and confusion, I don't know how to look for the creatures I know must be here, even at the start of Winter. If I come often and move slowly and look hard, I may begin to see. For the first time in years I have the time.

The valley rolls widely before it rises. The vast sloping pastures, the alpage, will be lush in Spring, but are scrubby now in the growing chill. The colours today are all shades of grey, almost a  black and white photograph. The air is how it is high up: thin and fierce. Mist hangs in patches and as one of these thins momentarily I can make out, way down the road, a rough building, a storehouse or shepherd's hut, and walking towards it a slight young man in a leather jacket and two very small, long-haired girls clutching his hands and skipping along. As I watch, a slim figure with a big shock of hair and a swirling cloak comes out of the building and runs to meet them. The mist swirls back. The mind in silence does funny things. I don't yet see the creatures of this landscape, but the creatures of my own internal landscape are ever present.

Walking back as the sun sinks lower and watching the monastery reappear around a bend, I learn its contours from a distance - its stones as grey as the fields and peaks on this pale day, a satisfying, complex jumble of slopes and angles with the toy arches of the cloister at one end. I'd count walking back on a cold, darkening day to a welcoming place you're glad to be going to as one of life's greatest joys, especially if your life hasn't featured too much sense of home. This moment joins a precious, to be hoarded, string of such moments.

The faint smell and hum of habitation come to greet me on the last hundred yards of road back to the gate in the high wall, and as it clangs behind me I see several figures engaged in tasks around the grounds, although the light is fading and an electric lamp shines already above the main door.

In the cloister, Lisanne is sweeping and shoveling the last of the fallen leaves. Lisanne is the only retreatant I've spoken to. We met on the almost empty local train and took an aged taxi together from the town, giggling as it groaned reluctantly up the mountain road. She's about my age, tiny, with close-cropped grey hair and black button eyes and a witchy, good humoured face. She's left a lover and a thriving business, a thriving life, in Lyon to come on retreat for three months - more worthy of respect that I who have fled from a life I didn't want.

We exchange smiles, pleased to see one another's patent happiness with the day. For a moment I regret not having a name and context for each of the others. Silence is a sacrifice, though a beautiful one and a different, powerful way of being together. Several times in London I've met someone deeply familiar, for whom I feel great affection, and I haven't known why, haven't known them from Adam. We've stared and smiled and progressed to embarrassed enquiries and eventually realised that we've been on retreat together. The faces and mannerisms of the people gathered here will likely stay with me for life.

As I walk back into this and the sweet expectation of supper and the candle-lit meditation hall, the images from memory fade, but not for long. That night, less tired than the last, wrapped in a nest of blankets on my bed, I sit for a long time before sleeping and remember.

THANKSGIVING

   

like stained glass again, though no glass here

I like it when American friends ask: "what are you grateful for this Thanksgiving?", though I wince too and don't find it easy to answer.

Kindness, resilience, friends on line and off, and (not always, but on balance) that life continues to surprise me.

BREATHER

Having had it with London up to the back teeth and so far past them it's coming out my ears as horrible, evil-smelling black smoke, to Cambridge for the weekend, where Kettle's Yard has a meditation on Rodin's Eve, with full size and smaller copies and many wonderful photos of the statue - some by the artist's friends and colleagues and some very recent; all of them works of art in themselves. Lots of space and light and paper, boards, pencils and stools provided, and an invitation to draw.

And the intimate theme continues with Rembrants's etchings of himself and of his wife, Saskia, on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum - sketches so much of their time, that yet so erase the time between us.

And the sun shone all weekend.

AUTUMN WINDOWS

Autumn leaves through steamy windows - like stained glass.

click on photos to enlarge

THE THIRD MONK II

The monk reminds me of Jean-Paul. The same face, both soft and acute. The same forward-leaning, just-alighted-and-about-to-take-off-again stance. The same characteristic flippant gesture, silently, when he puts down the ladle: desinvolture. Funny if he had the same flat, twangy Marseille accent. Well, I may not know that for three months. Perhaps he'll give a talk. I don't think so: the programme only mentions talks by Rinpoche. He might lead the chanting one day, though - would you detect a Marseille accent in Tibetan chanting? He's the right age. Jean-Paul was 32 or 33 when I knew him thirty years ago (how can anything be thirty years ago? and at the same time just yesterday?). Light, elusive, quicksilver man. And yet, it was you who first showed me stillness and contemplation, sitting for hours lost in your music. It's right, somehow, that I should find your double here. I didn't know then what I sought, no idea, but I glimpsed it, in a new country and landscape, a different mentality, and, at its most focused, in you.

More? Alright? Quoi?, the monk's eyes are saying. Standing before him, I have stopped the queue. With an embarrassed smile, I move on and sit down at the table with my bowl, trying to collect myself, breathing, smelling steamy soup-fumes. Leek and potato. Louise, your mother, made it often. Surfacing in this quiet place, in my quieted mind, with unprecedented force and clarity, long-lost feelings from that year in the South of France when I was twenty sieze and shake me. Funny thing, the mind in silence. You never know where it's going to go. I shake my head in wonder and savour my soup and feel the old bench under me, and the stone floor, and look at my fellow robed retreatants up and down the long table. It's cold and I'm glad of my big, warm, enveloping robe and the hot soup warming me, cup my hands around the bowl, bend and let the steam flush my cheeks.

A silent retreat is a voyeur's dream - the look our only exchange. I feel bad sometimes about how much I stare, consciously bring metta to it; look, love, don't judge. We are 20 or so around the table, more men than women. Look at them slowly, bit by bit; I have lots of time to see them. And look to myself, try not to devour with my eyes, clutch and spin all your stories - enough stories of my own, if I must, if I can't just be here.

The hot liquid, floury dissolving potato and sour, smooth, finely-chopped green pieces of leek: one of those meals I will remember and invoke when friends ask, "what was your best meal ever?". This, and the robe around me, and the soft, silent bodies around me, and the pale, enclosing walls, limewashed over flaking plaster, and the half-lit, bleached and dusty wooden beams above: these are enough. For once I am not lonely, not bored, not impatient. All this right here would be filling me up, were it not for that shocking blast of memory, stirring my heart still, fluttering my guts, even as the soup warms them.

So I'm not surprised when later, after the last sitting with dark and candles and cold draughts and sweet warmth within, after I drop, so tired, into my still unfamiliar bed and watch the shadows on the low ceiling and the rough curtains stir, and quickly fall asleep (when did I last do that?), I dream about unfeasibly bright Riviera sunshine and the high voices and sticky fingers of little girls, and about Marianne and Jean-Paul.

It's a rushed return from a far-off time and climate when the bell rings at 5.30 in the moonless, mysterious valley morning, a cold fumbling into clothes and robe and bewildered, hasty walk down creaking stairs to the meditation hall. Shadowy figures converge and I half expect to hear Matins plainchant, not the sound of my own memories breathing for an hour in silence, broken by the old Tibetan's voice in a different kind of song, dedicating our silence to the good of all beings and then, in fluent French and halting English, announcing the day's schedule.

Today, of course, will be like all the other days: sit, eat, work, and sit, eat, rest, and sit, eat, sit again and sleep. But each long, quiet day will be different.

THE THIRD MONK

I'm tired still from yesterday's journey and all that went before. My shoulders ache from the backpack. My knees spent too long bent in the too-small budget plane seat and now they click as they burrow into the unfamiliar dark-green cushioned mat. My hands, with the marks of heavy handles, curl in my lap. My head nods forward and I straighten up, breathe deeply, swallowing the smell of waxed floor, flesh, hair and wool, savouring the sweet knowledge that finally I'm here.

Here I am safe. Here there are no questions - or rather, many questions, all the questions, but none demanding immediate answers. Here, in the domain of silence, incense and grumbling bellies, no justification is required. Anyone who's been here will recognise the meditation hall, recognise it with your eyes shut if that's how you usually meditate. I do. I've tried to change, to vary, but closing my eyes is restful, calms the constant over-stimulation, the pervasive unfed hunger. Calm, yes. Refuge, yes. But not escape. I won't have you call it that. Safe does not mean easy. This is never easy. This is challenging my deepest-seated habits. This is ploughing across the deep ruts in my character, not along them. Chug. Churn. Block. Grate. I am stony ground.

And now the bell, soft footsteps on bare boards and the swishing of robes. I've heard it said that on a long retreat you come to know the feet, the footfall, of each fellow retreatant - no need to look up. I don't know them yet, but I love them already. The simplicity of this place has entered me. I am so glad to be here, with the former life behind me and the gift of this between-time, not knowing what comes next.

Slowly, I shrug my shoulders, wriggle my shoulder-blades, stretch out my fingers and open my eyes to look out through the tall window at the secret valley of St-Pierre, high in the French alps, once home to medieval Carthusian monks and now to this small Buddhist monastery where the silent three-month Winter retreat has just begun.

Slowly, we file out of the meditation hall, my footfalls and swishing robe part now of the whole. Pegs line the wall of the flagstone-floored corridor outside and I shrug out of my strange, heavy robe and hang it carefully, casing myself instead in hooded coat and gloves and scarf and boots. Slow, deliberate. Now there is only here, only now, this action. My work period done for the day, I am free to explore, swing open the heavy wooden door into the cloister.

I'll walk just once round the cloister in ritual greeting, then, before I take the path through the wrought-iron gate to leave the grounds. My feet find smooth, worn-shiny cobblestones, fading here and there into pools of rough poured concrete. In the centre, the fountain is dry and carcasses of Summer's planting squat with bent heads, resigned to the coming snow. The enclosing stone walls and pillars are old, plain, flaking and much mended. No carved capitals here - perhaps there never were. The only pattern is the regular perspective of retreating and converging arches. The grey-green cloister exudes age and cold, yet isn't dank and doesn't make me shiver. It breathes an embracing sweetness and holds me as I walk the length of all four arcades, once and again.

A harsh stone under foot evokes for a moment the hard pavements of Central London, walking in The Strand, beneath those tall old trees, looking up occasionally and feeling real, but more often than not all texture and detail drowned in cacophony. Here there is no one but me, no noise but my footsteps.

Cloister: all its connotations of closure, confinement. But no, it is not confining. It's a path without end, a bottomless space reaching deep into a long history of pacing feet. Suddenly this is not difficult. I can walk here, happily, joyfully, along and along and along and along, far into wherever I want to go. When the short afternoon darkens, I'm still pacing the cloister - a magical walking meditation. I haven't left the monastery precincts and seen the valley, but I've travelled a long way. Coming in for supper I am full of purpose, eager on my way to me, to here.

For many years I've felt that I was in the wrong place, woken every day and wondered how on earth I landed in this particular life. I've split myself off, settled for a fragmented travesty of presence. But just for now, for this three months' commitment to retreat, I want only to be here. This is the right place. No, simply, this is the place: let the judging, comparing voice be still. And still, stilled within, I follow the other shuffling, smiling feet into the vaulted dining hall and queue to get my soup, served today by one of the monks.

Three monks live here. The first is a wrinkled, glittering Tibetan elf. The second a lanky, red-cheeked young Englishman. The third monk, who silently serves our supper, is a Frenchman, in his sixties I supppose. Small, slim, stoop-shouldered, with a shiny skull that is naturally bald, not shaved, he has one of those rubbery French faces that bend and crack across into wry, quick, clever smiles. He reminds me of someone.

To be continued. Maybe.

DOUBLE GAZING

Between the inner and the outer panes of double glazing: life, words. The space between two visions, two versions.

Both hands needed, just now, to hold the two panes apart. So no blogging for a while.