Satori

“Yes, they do,” Nicholai agreed.

“Would you like to help?” Xue Xin asked.

“Forgive me,” Nicholai said, “but it seems an impossible task.”

“Not at all. Every day I clean each day’s growth away.”

“But it grows back,” Nicholai said. “Then you just have to do it again the next day.”

“Exactly.”

So Nicholai took to helping Xue Xin with the repetitive task of trying to keep the path clear. They met every morning and worked for hours, then stopped and took tea when the afternoon rain slashed down. Nicholai learned that Xue Xin was an honored guest at the monastery.

“They put up with me,” Xue Xin said. “I work. And you?”

“I don’t know if I am a guest here or a prisoner,” Nicholai answered truthfully, although he left it at that.

“As in life itself.” Xue Xin chuckled. “Are we its guest, or its prisoner?”

“As life dictates, I suppose.”

“Not at all,” Xue Xin answered.

“What do you mean?”

“It has stopped raining,” Xue Xin observed in response. They went back to work on the path.

The next day Xue Xin observed, “You attack the vines as if they are your enemy.”

“Are they not?”

“No, they are your allies,” Xue Xin answered. “Without them, you would not have a useful task to perform.”

“I would then have another useful task,” Nicholai answered, annoyed.

“With another set of ally-enemies,” Xue Xin said. “It is always the same, my Eastern-Western friend. But, by all means, if it makes you feel better, attack, attack.”

That night, lying in his kang, lonely and missing Solange, Nicholai had a crisis of the mind and soul. Raised as he was, he was familiar with basic Buddhist philosophy – only the unfamiliar would call it a religion, or the Buddha a god – that all suffering comes from attachment, that we are prisoners of our longings and desires that keep us bound to the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. He knew the Buddhist belief that these longings make us take negative actions – sins, if you must – that create and accumulate bad karma that must be ameliorated through the lifetimes, and that only enlightenment can free us from this trap.

He got up, took his flashlight, and made his way to Xue Xin’s cell. The monk was in full lotus position, meditating.

“You wish to trim vines by moonlight?” Xue Xin asked. “Very well, but do it without me, please.”

“I want my freedom.”

“Then trim vines.”

“That is glib,” Nicholai answered. “I expect more from you than Zen riddles.”

“You are suffering?”

Nicholai nodded.

Xue Xin opened his eyes, exhaled a long breath as if to reluctantly end his meditation, and then said, “Sit down. You cannot find enlightenment, you can only be open to it finding you. That’s satori.”

“And why you chose it as a code word,” Nicholai said. “Back in Beijing.”

“You needed to see things as they really were,” Xue Xin answered. “Until then, there was no helping you.”

“If you cannot find satori, how-”

“It might come in a drop of rain,” Xue Xin continued, ignoring the question, “a note from a faraway flute, the fall of a leaf. Of course, you have to be ready for it or it will pass unnoticed. But if you are ready, and your eyes are open, you will see it and suddenly understand everything. Then you will know who you are and what you must do.”

“Satori.”

“Satori,” Xue Xin repeated. Then he added, “If our thoughts imprison us, it stands to reason that they can also set us free.”

Yu came to see him the next morning.

The Chinese had accepted his offer.

94

THE NORMAL ROUTE of arms shipments from China to Vietnam, Yu explained, was through Lang Son, across the border, and directly into the north of Vietnam, where the Viet Minh had secure sanctuaries in the mountainous jungles.

But they were not going to take that route.

The rocket launchers were needed in the south, not the north.

“That is information that our enemies would pay dearly to obtain,” Yu said.

Indeed it is, Nicholai thought. Since its last disastrous effort in the south, the Viet Minh had confined their activities to the north. But now it appeared that, if armed with the new weaponry, they were planning to launch a new southern front.

The northern Viet Minh were dominated by the Soviets, the southern were more independent or allied with China. A successful southern offensive would shuffle the geopolitical deck in Asia.

Yu was playing a deep game.

Given the fact that the weapons had to go to the southern Viet Minh units, there was only one possible route, down the Lekang River into Laos.

It would be no easy feat, he explained. The Lekang ran through deep gorges with boiling rapids and sharp rocks that could pierce the hulls of boats like eggshells. The river was not easily navigable until south of the town of Luang Prabang, deep into Laos.

Luang Prabang itself would present problems. They would have to switch boats there for the rest of the journey, and the area was rife with spies and French special forces.

And then there was the Binh Xuyen.

“What’s the Binh Xuyen?” Nicholai asked.

“Pirates,” Yu answered.

“Pirates?” Nicholai asked. It seemed a tad anachronistic.

Originally river pirates from the vast Rung Sat marshes south of Saigon, the Binh Xuyen, now opium merchants, virtually controlled that city. Their leader, a former convict named Bay Vien, supported the Viet Minh, but had changed sides and was now a close ally of the puppet emperor Bao Dai and his French masters. As a reward, Bay Vien controlled drugs, gambling, and prostitution in Saigon, and used the resulting vast wealth to acquire modern arms and equipment.

“That’s Saigon,” Nicholai said. “What does Bay Vien have to do with Laos?”

“It’s where the opium comes from,” Yu answered.

The Viet Minh used to buy raw opium in the mountains east of Luang Prabang and sell it to buy weapons, but through bribery, intimidation, and assassinations, the Binh Xuyen had virtually taken control of the Laotian opium trade.

Luang Prabang swarmed with Binh Xuyen. Yu went on, “A Viet Minh agent will meet you there and escort you into Vietnam.”

Nicholai noted the shift to the second-person singular and mentioned it.

“This is why we require your services,” Yu said. “My superiors have decided that they cannot take the risk of my getting captured in French territory.”

He told Nicholai how he would be contacted in Luang Pra-bang and later in Saigon, and then resumed his briefing.

In Laos, the Lekang changed its name to the Mekong as it flowed through Cambodia into the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The delta would be a challenge – not only would they have to evade the patrols of the French army and the Foreign Legion, but they would have to make their way through a network of blockhouses and forts.