darkness, without speech or sound, and she opened her lips to his, her breath mingling with his breath, her heart beating alongside his. She reached up a hand to touch his cheek. He felt strange to her: her fingers strayed blindly among the thick hairs of his beard.
As desire grew in both of them, it blotted out everything else.
The world shrank to a tiny point, then vanished. Only their bodies remained, floating in the void. They had become a single universe into which no light or sound or good or evil entered.
She helped him undress with fingers made clumsy by passion.
Why had no-one told her this, that a man’s body was more beautiful than a god’s, the awkwardness of desire more satisfying than the most perfect ritual, a moment’s fulfilment worth more than a lifetime of righteous virginity? Even the gods cohabited with their celestial consorts: the rhythms of their bodies in the act of love cast shadows over the world of men.
His hands moved over her now with the ease of love that has become whole. Out of his past, memories came to inform and guide his fingers along the uncharted waters of her flesh. He sensed her uncertainty and her hesitation in this strange novitiate. She had no memories to guide her, only instinct and the patterns set by her impassioned deities.
And yet, as he moved into her and they gave themselves up wholly to the dance, they discovered a fierce harmony, a single rhythm that possessed their bodies and their hearts entirely. She moved beneath him, easily, softly, without guilt or shame, in slow, erotic measures no art or artifice could match. And he moved in her perfectly, matching his actions to hers, seeking her in the dark with a dream-like intensity. And so the memories fell away and there was only this moment, only love for her, transcending the past, driving it out, remaking it in her image.
And finally there was silence. And darkness that seemed to stretch into eternity. They lay together, only their fingers touching.
Neither spoke.
By morning, the snow had stopped. They were the only living things in a white immensity that seemed to have no end.
At noon on the same day, they found a pass leading into the Tsangpo valley region. Beyond the pass, they came upon a hut inhabited by two hunters. The men were sullen at first, but when Chindamani told them who she was, the frowns left their faces and food and drink appeared as if from nowhere. Christopher realized how little he really knew of her. Here, she was a sort of queen, a holy person whom others would obey without question or hesitation. He kept his distance from her while they remained at the hut.
The hunters gave them directions to Gharoling, the monastery to which Tobchen Geshe had tried to take Samdup for refuge.
They arrived there two days later. The monastery was situated to the north of the mountain range through which they had passed, in a secluded valley through which ran a tributary of the Yarlong Tsangpo, the northern section of the Brahmaputra. Shigatse, the capital of Tsang province, was only a few days away to the northeast.
An early spring had come to the valley. Grass grew on the banks of the river, riveted to the earth by small blue flowers that neither of them could name. There were trees, and birds to sing in them, and green buds forming on their branches. A small village nestled beneath the gompa, which stood on a low hill near the head of the valley. White prayer-flags fluttered everywhere, filling the air with a soft flapping sound.
They stood at the entrance to the valley, dressed in their travel worn clothes, pinched and hungry, gazing at the scene in front of them like damned souls gazing into paradise. Chindamani’s eyes were wide with amazement: she had never known a world that was not bound by winter. The seasons meant nothing to her. She touched the grass with unbelieving fingers, smelled the warm air, and watched the birds collect twigs for their nests.
Christopher picked a flower for her and placed it in her hair.
“I’ll keep it always, Ka-ris To-feh,” she said.
He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“It will die soon. If you put it in water, it will last a few days more. But then it will die.”
She looked crestfallen for a moment, then smiled.
“Perhaps that is why it is so beautiful,” she said.
He looked at her, at the flower on her temple.
“Yes,” he said. And he thought she was beautiful. And that she would die.
She spent most of the day following their arrival closeted with the abbot, Khyongla Rinpoche. When she emerged that evening, her face was serious, and Christopher’s best efforts could not secure a smile. She would not tell him what the abbot had said.
They slept in separate rooms, and that night she did not come to him. He waited for her until dawn, but in the end resigned himself to her absence and slept fitfully through the morning.
A week passed, during which they ate and rested and gained strength for the journey ahead. Each day they left the monastery and walked together in the green valley, or sat on the banks of the river. Dorje-la seemed worlds away, a place of horrors unimaginable here. They were lovers in a world made for love. The rest was a nightmare or an illusion. But when she came from her talks with the abbot her eyes were clouded with sadness neither the sunshine nor his words of endearment could dispel.
“Do you love me truly, Ka-ris To-feh?” she asked.
“Yes, little Drolma,” he said.
“Please. I’ve asked you not to call me that.” Her face grew troubled.
“Why not?”
“Because.”
He frowned.
“Does she still live in you?” he asked.
She nodded. A shadow passed over the water.
“Yes,” she said.
“No matter what happens, she lives in me.”
“I see. Very well, I promise not to call you Drolma if you promise to call me what my friends call me.”
“What’s that?”
“Chris,” he said.
“Ka-ris.” She laughed.
“That’s all right. I’ll call you Ka-ris from now on.”
He smiled at her.
“And you,” he said.
“Do you love me truly?”
She bent forward and kissed him. In the sky a lammergeyer plunged.
They talked of his life: India, England, the war. It was all fresh to her, all beyond imagining. When he talked of cities, she could see nothing but gigantic monasteries, seething with people. When he told her of ships sailing the sea between India and home, she thought only of a vast expanse of rippling snow. The river beside which they walked was the first flowing water she had seen: the ocean was beyond all thought. When he spoke of tanks and aeroplanes, she shook her head in disbelief and closed her eyes.
Once, an early butterfly passed over their heads, bright-winged and doomed to die by nightfall. He watched it go and thought of Puccini’s opera, of Butterfly waiting year after year for the return of Pinkerton, of Oriental fidelity and Western treachery.
“My Butterfly,” he murmured, caressing her cheek with a thoughtful hand.
She smiled and looked at him, thinking of the painted wings that had passed her a moment ago. He looked away, remembering a painted stage and a woman in a kimono, dying for love, waiting for smoke to appear on a distant horizon.
In a cave above the monastery lived an old hermit, a gomchen who had been immured there at the age of twenty, forty years earlier. The cave had neither window nor door, but inside a spring rose up and flowed through a small opening in the wall before running down to join the river below. Every morning, the villagers would leave food in the opening; every evening they would collect the empty bowl. Otherwise, nothing passed in or out of the
