we’re so anxious to picture their skin, their hands, whatever deformities we associate with this illness, but their voices are silent. Silent even to me who shares their disease. Why don’t we think of their voices? Of what they said or what they read. Of a hunger that felt like any other hunger. Or of their names. Or of what they did hour by hour with their days.)
The warden pleaded to be released, but the authorities wouldn’t allow it. Finally, after five years, the hospital was closed. Imagine the remaining patients traveling in a wobbly chain of small boats over the sea. They were taken to another, farther island where no one spoke their language, where they understood nothing at all. The warden wrote to the king of Sweden, “I carried out my service in frost and cold. In autumn and spring I was often trapped in sea-ice. Thus have I now become an ailing man.”
I think, of their voices. Of the way I cant hear them. The way I can see the ice floes, cattle, roofs, but not a single individual face, not really.
Last night it rained as I thought it would.
Your Friend,
Clerval hunches over his writing table making lists of medicinal herbs he hopes to someday send to his friend. For my leper, he writes, and then, but why do I say “my” and with what arrogance, what presumption? Then crosses it all out. But I don’t know his name, he never told me his name
He writes to his friend who has no name, or no name he can know, and I live out my life without a name. Sometimes I still marvel that you gave me no name, though of course it makes sense—I was nothing you wanted.
The window’s darkening. He’s writing Daiyu over and over, then crossing it out.
Daiyu Dai yu die/you/I I/You
Then:
I want to know what happens to Miaoyu, the young nun from Sakyamuni Convent who calls herself “The One Outside the Threshold.” She lives in poverty keeps to herself, refuses to shave her head, gives plum blossoms to Baoyu. Widely read and well versed in the sutras, she’s come to the capital to see the relics of Guanyin.
There are so many people and stories in this novel it’s hard to keep track. Still, when I lie down I think of Miaoyu and how she holds herself apart, refers to herself sometimes as “The Odd One.”
My Friend in Aosta, could he also sign his name “The One Outside the Threshold”?—he who must never pass his garden walls.
I think of the violence inside the word threshold. “To trample, to tread,” my book says.
To enter a house one must cross a threshold, so is there violence in the very entering? As there’s violence in the many thresholds of the mind … Those first days after you left me I grew afraid of my thoughts as I watched distant windows, human shapes lit and shadowy behind them, sometimes touching, sometimes not.
What thresholds does Miaoyu keep herself away from in the world and in her mind? If she stays apart from Baoyu’s world, if she won’t step across that threshold, are there still others she must cross?
Is it possible never to cross or enter at all?
(She keeps her hair long, lives in poverty, stays to herself.)
“The One Outside the Threshold.” I’m nameless. Could that be my name?
from Chapter 17—
“If not for this hill,” observed Jia Zheng, “one would see the whole garden as soon as one entered, and how tame that would be.”
Aosta, June 5
My Friend,
I’ve been reading Marco Polo’s Travels, also known as The Description of the World. I who travel nowhere travel in this way. Sometimes in my mind I walk, up to your door, raise my hand to knock. If it’s winter when you read this, do you carry in your wide Chinese sleeves the tiny brass stoves I’ve read of? Do you hear the bells that hang from the necks of donkeys and camels laden with goods: bags of rice flour, tea, and the hard compound of clay and coal dust made up into tight balls that serves as fuel? Have you seen the great stone pagoda thirteen stories high, its four doors facing north, south, east and west that can only be reached by long ladders? At night when you dream, what country are you in? Or have such boundaries and categories dissolved—shape-shifted and redefined themselves in ways I can’t begin to know? (My garden walls, my weekly package at the door…)
Marco Polo wrote