English / Sample translations /

Atoms of Fear

/Translated by Elsa Morrison/

          Now for Tibet! How can I stop thinking about Kathmandu which was supposed to be simply the place from which we were to be catapulted over the Chinese border! Off we go, then, on the morning bus, squashed between parcels and our rucksacks, we looked out bravely from the roof at the folds of steep hills and valleys of the countryside. The colours were different, red-brown and green, cascades of little terraced fields, villages like buoys on heavy seas. The road swept up and down, a thin line winding round the mountains. If you watched it closely it would make you dizzy. Our sixteen-year-old guide however, certainly did not suffer from vertigo. Throughout the journey, like a squirrel, he climbed all over the bus, now behind us on the roof and then in again through the window. A sturdy, muscular figure in shorts and sandshoes, he wants to be a driver but even working as a guide delights him. When boys only a few years younger than himself attempted to hang on to the bus as we passed through villages he self-importantly chased them off, although he must surely have done the same thing himself. Even now he would jump down and sprint along in the dust behind us and although the passengers laughed at him derisively, with youthful dignity he ignored them. We told him we thought Nepal was nicer than India. He looked thoughtfully at Zuzka and me and nodded gravely.
          "Besides, in India there are bad people," he said.
          "Why do you think that?" we asked, humouring him. Apparently in India they would not even give him water unless he paid for it. He shook his head at something so inconceivably wrong that to this day he still could not understand it.
          Thus easily is born hatred between nations.
          We made our way through ravines to the frontier. Streams and glistening garlands of waterfalls gushed down from the rocks, a river flowed towards us between ragged banks at such speed that you could imagine its devastating strength after the monsoons. The little road, patched up, took us to Barabise, the terminus of the state bus service. Little privately-owned buses or jeeps, charging exorbitant prices, set out for the border at Kodari. Zuzka questioned tourists coming from Tibet. Apparently the road to Tibet was dreadful, with dangerous places, and should it rain in the night, it would probably be impassable. It was beginning to get dark and it was drizzling. At last we found a bus at a more reasonable cost and with it we climbed to the border along the fractured road. The gorge was so narrow, river and road so near each other, that from the window of the bus you could not see the tops of the hills. The bus staggered drunkenly along. Now and then it stopped and most of the passengers got out into the darkness to reduce the weight. Not until next day when it was light did I realise they had not wanted to risk their lives when the bus went through particularly terrifying places. Only a few Nepalese and some unsuspecting tourists remained in the bus in the dry.
          Kodari, a dark hole, with lights twinkling in a few travelers’ shelters. The air, cold and strong as drift-ice, swept down from the towering ramparts of the mountains. We joined up with an enormous Nepalese businesswoman and with her shared a tiny room and a single plate of rice complemented with daal, typical Nepalese mushy peas. We drank Chinese beer, some of us had Chinese brandy. We were uneasily aware of that strange world somewhere above our heads. Before we retired to the inn we stayed for a while looking through the night at the ring of lights of the little town up there, across the border; not speaking, uneasy, feeling that we were being watched. Nervously we went and lay down. Outside the window the river flowing from Tibet roared ceaselessly.
          Wednesday the fifteenth of September. The day we were to cross the border, the day we were to enter Tibet. Meanwhile we climbed onto the back of a lorry with a couple of dozen Nepalese, Chinese and Tibetans. After a while I was sorry we had not decided to do these last few kilometres on foot. On the lorry we bounced up and down like ping-pong balls. A sinewy, moustached Nepalese was doing his best to use me as an armchair. I suffered in silence while he hung on to our legs, Zuzka's and mine, but as soon as he tried to settle down between my knees I dislodged him angrily.
          "Get off me, I'm not a bed!" I said furiously, but the Nepalese, puzzled, only grinned foolishly from ear to ear. He continued to lie on me till his neighbour told him off. But until then, Dusan! I don’t remember ever giving way to such racist fury as in these extremely uncomfortable moments when that dark dirty body with the wide, artless smile on his weatherbeaten face leaned all his weight on my lap.
          I don't know if I have the right to excuse my racism by the nervousness I felt about the checks by the Chinese border controls. Would they even let us in? Would they search our rucksacks? What about the pack of photos of the Dalai Lama, and the cassette from Dharamsala with the recorded messages for the relations in Lhasa? After weeks of freedom in India and Nepal I was annoyed at my fear and worries about trying to smuggle stuff in. However the moment that Zuzka had so dreaded passed off without difficulty. We got through the three stages of the customs relatively easily. Only Zuzka's rucksack was searched. Fortunately they left me alone. We had no difficulty in filling in the forms with false information about where we were going to stay in China and the name of the agency organizing our travels.
          Our passports were handed back to us, we strapped on our rucksacks and slowly moved away from the bright green uniforms into Tibet. Surely they couldn't send us back now! The exhilarating feeling of relief did not last long, the world beyond the frontier was bewilderingly different.
          English was now no help to us. Apparently there was no transport. To be sure the Himalayan air was the same as in Kodari but here it was thick with invisible atoms of fear. In the looks, gestures and speech of the people there was a furtiveness and wariness as though they were afraid of being overheard or else, weary and expressionless, they kept their heads firmly down. After a few days most of this would pass unnoticed, like getting used to a peculiar smell that hit you on entering a strange house. However I would never have imagined that here, in a muddy street full of Chinese shops, Chinese eating places, bars with billiard tables and Chinese and Tibetans standing around, I would be entering a place where freedom did not exist, the kind of thing that we had left conclusively behind a few years previously.
          We changed some money with a suspicious Tibetan shopkeeper and in the pubs we asked about transport. There were no buses only lorries. We tried our luck with the lorry drivers but they couldn't or wouldn't talk to us. For more than an hour we stood in front of a truck which was being loaded. To force a reaction from the Tibetan driver I tied our rucksacks on top of the lorry driver's cabin. No? We heaved our rucksacks back on our shoulders determined to get to Tibet, if necessary under our own steam.
          We waded through swollen streams, the rain became heavier. We passed three Westerners, who watched us from the pub with amazement. Round another sharp bend in the road even we had to take shelter. Then, two lorries drove up. The uncommunicative driver was more forthcoming now that there were no witnesses. He explained that there were police checks on the road and pantomimed a punch on the jaw and that he was afraid. But he was tempted by our money. We tried his colleague who was bolder. Our rucksacks were put under the canvas. Zuzka sat in the cabin and I stood on the running-board. To get ourselves moving, it was not too bad. The main thing, I told myself, was to get out of this dump at the border, even if I did have to jump down when the road narrowed, then catch up with the lorry as slowly worked its way up the hill.
          Fortunately for me we stopped for tea at a small shed. Zuzka finally made herself understood in Tibetan. Safely in privacy, the drivers melted like butter in their tea. The ice was broken. It was agreed that they would take us as far as Nyalam. Zuzka handed out the first photos of the Dalai Lama. I sat in the cabin of the first lorry. The rain became unpleasantly heavier again. After less than a kilometer I had to get down. There was a mudslide and it deposited a heap of stones and earth on the rutted track. Behind us was a gorge with waterfalls streaming down from the roof of the world as if the gutters up there were overflowing. Ahead of us a strip of mud was flowing into the chasm. When I picked up some stones from the avalanche, I tried not to look as I threw them down the hill. The drivers made their way from the other side across the mass of fallen rocks. From the Tibetan side a jeep with a group of Chinese men in ties and with briefcases with arrived and, trousers rolled up, picked their way round behind us to where another jeep was waiting for them.
          "Come and help us!" I yelled after them, shaking my fist. They simply giggled happily.
          "It wasn't very nice to watch," said Zuzka nervously, describing the treacherous mud oozing round the wheels of our lorry as it reached the mass of fallen rocks of the landslide, which was now, with us, on the move again. It was a good job the driver was determined and that the engine had enough power.
          A few days later we found out that shortly after us another lorry had not had the same good fortune and had plunged down the ravine. We spent a few more nervous hours on the empty road along the river and on the bends above it. Then, almost imperceptibly, we turned into a pass and finally arrived at the top. In the distance a tinge of blue, a mere peephole in the clouds, gave the promise of a rainless Tibet. In Nyalam we tried to talk the driver at supper into taking us on as far as the village with Milarapa’ s gonpa. He was afraid to take us as far as Dingri. By then I had got used to our driver, a vigorous, thickset fellow, good-hearted and skilful who could cope more readily with an avalanche of stones and mud than with the Chinese surveillance.
         Our first night in Tibet. In Milarapa’ s gonpa they turned us away, but an obliging man with the noisiest dog in the village took us in. Inside the little house everything was just as you might imagine. In the middle of the fireplace under the hole for the smoke there was a small wooden churn for butter for the tea and some essential crockery. Round the walls on the clay floor there were beds, fewer it seemed to me than the number of members of the family. Salty Tibetan tea with butter is truly revolting but to be polite I drank a bowl of it, Zuzka, the brave ethnographer had two more cups. We used our own supplies for our evening meal but we watched with interest the preparations for the Tibetan family's meal. It was mainly the elder son who, with the help of a dictionary, conversed with Zuzka, I taught the younger boy to make squeaky sounds with a balloon we had given him. After everyone had eaten the head of the family ground some red chilli peppers. I unpacked our bedrolls. No, no, we have beds for our guests! We were quite embarrassed by this hospitality but we did not want to give offence. I was given a thick pillow, as if I wanted to go on reading before going to sleep. But I did not read. I listened as the family around us prepared to retire for the night and to the tireless barking of the watchdog outside. I looked through the opening in the roof to the stars and imagined that what I could hear was the same river the poet Milarapa had listened to in his hermitage nine hundred years ago.