China by Edward Rutherfurd (historical books to read TXT) 📕

express the thing they see before them. Gradually they lose their sense of self entirely. It’s the Tao, if you like. Their soul, as we like to say, is something they are not conscious of at all. It’s a sort of nothingness. Every attempt to describe it, funnily enough, destroys it.” He smiled. “Even I, a poor old man in a village with a few stupid pupils, understand this—a little at least.”

“I don’t understand what you are saying at all,” I said. I wasn’t being rude. I just didn’t know what he meant. It didn’t sound like the finer things of life to me.

“I know,” he answered. “Perhaps you will one day.”

“Really?” I asked.

“No, not really,” he told me. “But one never knows.” He seemed to find this funny.

I did love the characters, though, and within weeks I could write quite a few in a manner that seemed to satisfy him.

The problem was the boots. My father had been able to get the leather from the workshop where he was employed at that time. And my mother had found him cloth and other things. But of course, he’d never made a pair of boots in his life. “It turns out,” he told my mother, “that it’s quite difficult.”

“You’d better get help,” my mother said. There was a shoemaker in the next village, and my mother knew her and went to ask her. But it didn’t do any good: The shoemaker said my father had no business making boots, and she wouldn’t help at all.

“Not to worry,” my father said. “I’ll get the hang of it.”

And finally he presented the old man with the boots, which seemed to fit all right. This was the early autumn season, and so my lessons continued. But then winter came. And one cold, wet morning, the old man came around to our house, very angry, and called out to my father so all the neighbors could hear: “Look at these boots. They’re letting in all the water, and my feet are freezing.”

“I’ll fix them,” said my father.

“No, you won’t,” the old man shouted. “If you knew what you were doing they wouldn’t be leaking in the first place. I’m not getting chilblains so that your son can learn to read and write.”

So that was the end of my lessons. I wanted to try to earn money myself to pay for the lessons, but whenever I did, my mother told me the family needed it. My father seemed to be depressed, and my mother told me not to talk to him about the lessons anymore, because it made him unhappy.

But I didn’t give up. If I saw a sign anywhere—in a temple, for instance—I’d copy it down on any scrap of paper I could find and try to work out what it meant. As you know, most of our Chinese characters are made up of little pictures of elements—a man, a house, the sun, water, and so forth—that combined together produce a meaning. As the years went by, I got to figure out a lot of them. But whenever I couldn’t, I’d go to my old master and ask him. The first time I did this he was rather angry. But when I told him what I thought a particular character meant and why, he burst out laughing and explained it. And after that, if he saw me in the village street, he’d call out, “Have you a new character for me?” Sometimes I guessed quite difficult meanings correctly, and once he looked at what I’d written and remarked: “Your writing isn’t all that bad, considering you have no idea what you’re doing.” I was so proud that he said that to me. But he still wouldn’t teach me because I couldn’t pay.

—

When I was fourteen years old, a message came from the Taoist monastery that Grandfather’s Elder Brother was dying, so my father and I walked back to Beijing. We found him in his house with one of the monks looking after him, and I could see that he must be close to the end. The monks had the coffin already in the house, as you’re supposed to do before someone dies. I looked around to make sure there wasn’t a mirror on any of the walls. I knew that if you saw a coffin in a mirror it means someone else in the family is going to die, and I didn’t want it to be me. I don’t believe Grandfather’s Elder Brother had a mirror, actually. He’d have thought it was superfluous. But if there was one, the monks had removed it.

He looked so frail and tiny. I remembered what he’d told me about how to die by starving oneself, but the monk assured me that the old man was still taking food and liquid. “He’s just very old,” he said.

When Grandfather’s Elder Brother saw me, he managed a weak smile and tried to raise his hand. So I held it, and I could just feel him give my hand a little squeeze. Then he saw my father.

“All gone,” he whispered. “All gone.” Though whether he was talking about his life or the fact that all the money was used up, I wasn’t sure. He didn’t say anything after that. He seemed to be dozing. During the night he was restless for a while; then he was still. He slipped away just before dawn.

He had no children to organize the funeral, of course. Fortunately the monks said that the old man had given them enough money to take care of the funeral, and they arranged everything, which was just as well, as I don’t think my father would have been a lot of use. They gave him a poor man’s wake—only three days instead of seven. But honestly that was enough.

Everything was in proper order. They placed a small gong on the left of the doorway and hung a white cloth from the lintel. They wrapped the old man’s body in a blue