Ti¿n / Ti?n / Burton New Welsh Review 136 (winter 2024)

East Asia
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-913830-29-8
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 136, 80 Seiten

Reihe: New Welsh Review

EDITORIAL by Gwen Davies EAST ASIAN LITERATURE 'The River Claims Its Debt' - Story by Ph??c Ti?n, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguy?n An Lý 'Powder to the People! The philosophy of Hokkaido capitalist ski bum, Jack Philips' - Biography/oral history by Susan Karen Burton 'Hi-Mawari', the lost Welsh story of Lafcadio Hearn (alias Koizumi Yakumo) -Translated from the Japanese Jayne Joso on how Japan shapes her work FURTHER FICTION 'The Banana Banshee' - Story by Deidre Brennan, translated from the Irish by the author REVIEW-ESSAYS Steven Lovatt on restoring natural and cultural ecologies in the work of Ruth Bidgood, Rae Howells and Carwyn Graves JL George on trauma and the magical child in recent novels by Lloyd Markham, Carly Holmes and Vajra Chandrasekera

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ti¿n, Phu¿c

Ti?n, Ph??c

Burton, Susan Karen

Hearn, Lafcadio

Joso, Jayne

Leseproben

THE RIVER COLLECTS ITS DEBT

STORY BY PHU?C TI?N, TRANSLATED FROM THE VIETNAMESE BY NGUY?N AN LÝ

The old man was brought to the pagoda at dawn on the fifth day. It was an autumn morning, drawn and tattered. The wind had kept still for so long that, now released to play on the eyelids of mourners, it brought with it the smell of fermented worms and insects. Those making up the cremation procession had all undergone a sleepless night. It was not far to the pagoda, but the narrow dirt path threaded all muddy below a Buddhist banner burning red in the sulfur-tinted smoke from the mourners’ torches. On this same path they had come home the night before, having prepared the pyre in the cremation pit, walking between rows of combretum trees silvered in the moonlight.

The boy was in the midst of that never-ending stream of people, trailing his father and the musicians in the traditional Khmer band. He had goosebumps all over, arising not just through nervousness, but the whole atmosphere: the rhythmic chants for the deceased, the sound of the clay pot banging against the top of the flagpole. Walking beside him was a girl with reddish-brown eyes, the colour of earthworms swollen fat in the dancing firelight.

The boy had just experienced the most horrific night in his young life. He had jolted awake in the darkest hours, to see the coffin lid wide open. His grandfather, furious, was climbing out. From his chest, midriff and legs, wrapping cloths came loose. The boy had sat all curled up on the threshold, waiting in vain for the old man to call out to him. A slow rhythm, like someone hammering on a chisel, was all that reached his ears, but it was too far away to locate. Against a background of shimmering violet, the shade of those desolate twilights on the riverbank, behind the candle which had inexpicably given up the ghost, his grandfather was now hovering above the intricately decorated coffin. His stomach was a yawning cave, empty of viscera. The boy thought he glimpsed, deep inside that cave, the tattered shape of a hut, crouching beside a soaring majestic steeple. Harsh laughter escaped from the old man. Unfurling from the pole in his hand was a white Buddhist flag bearing the image of a crocodile. His laughter echoed off the smoke-stained roof beams, paralysing the boy with fear. With a sudden shriek, the old man hurled the flagpole towards him. The ground shook, quivered and split apart. From innumerable cracks, rats swarmed out, squealing in innocent delight. The boy screamed, ‘No, grandfather! Please, no!’

By the time his anxious father came to wake him up, the boy had become almost mad with terror. The father clasped his son’s scrawny shoulders in his strong arms. The smell of the funeral spirits he had been drinking, infused with garlic cloves, brought the child to his senses, making him weep and confide his dream. The man’s face darkened. He looked up at the altar, now also tearful. The candle, which had been lit five days ago as a symbol of the deceased’s kindness towards the living, was no longer burning.

On the previous day, when the level of garlic alcohol in each decanter had dropped to less than half, five men had left the funeral party and embarked on a boat. The group had included the boy, who was considered a man by now. During the harvest, he had spent many nights in a granary hut together with the girl of the earthworm-coloured eyes.

The five tanned men, glistening with strength, had taken turns to guide the boat down the shallow mud-laden stream. Then they came to the great river. A solitary hut stood on the riverbank. The owner was away, transporting sugarcanes to the dam. They’d moored their boat in front of the hut. All they had with them were some shredded tobacco leaves and a few farm tools. The men had lain scattered on the riverbank, rolling cigarette after cigarette as they waited. The days-long funeral preparation had squeezed out the last drops of energy from them. In the very first days, they had had to scour the mangrove swamps of the South in order to fuel the pyre, but had come back almost empty-handed, save for some trees too young and fresh. The previous year, the weather was so dire there’d been mass deaths, and the living had visited upon the dry mangrove forests a devastation from which they hadn’t yet recovered.

Patiently, humbly, the five men had waited until high noon; five dried corkwood trees in the sun. No one rolled as many cigarettes as the boy, who felt like his throat was burning. He had heard from his father that the hut belonged to a man with brown eyes, a man from the North. Certain missteps in the war had sent him to prison, from where he’d emerged, denuded of everything but the clothes on his back. The boy’s grandfather had taken pity on him. This was long before the boy became a man. That hapless man hadn’t been able to pay back his debt, despite all those long years, and now his benefactor was dead.

Afternoon had come, the tobacco all run out. The five men got to their feet, one by one. They’d looked at one another, bathed in the violet desolation of that disorientating evening. Then the boy’s father had taken up a hoe as a signal. They’d started on the thatching. Gourd-shaped slaughtering knives were enough to take down the fragile roof frame. But when they came to the main pillars, the flooring had to be upturned with hoes, disturbing a colony of rats under the kitchen wing. They worked quickly, wordlessly. Everything that had been dismantled was then moved into the boat, and when it was all finished, they planted on the gouged-up plot of land a bamboo pole, around the top of which was wrapped a white crocodile banner. The returning boat cut into the stream, grooves snaking lazily.

By the early hours of the fifth day, the mourners had all ended up inside the pagoda compound. The crematorium had been set up on the riverbank, logs neatly heaped in ready piles. The streams of people flowed down the paved path. The chief monk was waiting there, and beside him was another carrying a kasaya.

The master of ceremonies turned up the cloth covering the dead man’s face. He had been a proud, generous man in his days. In the evening, he would sit on his doorstep and roll his cigarettes after a day in the fields. He would stay there for a long time, staring straight ahead, and his chin was as smooth as a boy’s. He had travelled his life always on the same path. Starting from those fields, those evenings on the doorstep, with not a hair on his chin, and never once a wavering of his eyes. But what was inside the coffin now was a log of meat the colour of mahogany, the tip of its swollen nose coming almost to its medial cleft. For the last five days, the chants for the peaceful passing of the soul had been carrying him, with all of an old farmer’s pride, to set him gently sailing along and up to the steeple above the pagoda’s main hall, untouched by the autumn winds.

On the first day when enbalming started, they had cut open the stomach and removed the entire viscera. But when it came to severing the corpse’s hamstrings, they had to stop due to exhaustion, and in consideration of the monks, who had been waiting too long to commence their chanting. Now new shrouds had replaced the old, but the boy’s father wouldn’t let them resume the job. He had been shaken by his son’s dream.

When the chanting finally ceased, the chief monk arrived. He stood under a young palm tree, cast a slow look around, the hint of a smile on his face. The descendants of the dead man in their rough cloth attire stood as silent and dusty as strands of passion vine. Weary and anticipating, their figures filled up the riverbank.

They had arrived, all those descendants, on the third day. Those who had wandered furthest from their homeland, all the way to the source of the Mekong, belonged to the second branch on the maternal line. They’d come home with their farewell gifts in a boat whose sides were painted with tiger stripes. The others had followed the dirt path, bringing with them musicians playing Khmer instruments or the Southern single-string zither. Tears were seldom part of their offering. To their fruit and kerosene and scrolls of fabric were added sacks of grain, opium and carob tea. They’d sat the whole night through on the brick yard in front of the steps, between rows of sturdy posts. Taking turns to haul hundreds of water carts through the vast expanse of dry fields, they only drank their own muddy well water mixed with sugar palm liquor. Peaceful, they’d sat side by side in the clear autumn night, the monks’ intonation caught in gentle eddies around the young branches of white bamboo, the mist-shrouded steeple, the canopies of palm leaves. They were partly drowning their sorrows, partly celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime reunion, partly remembering the departed. Old folks sipped the little cups of garlic-clove spirits. Young men drank with abandon. In the morning, when the chanting was over, the monks had had to leave unhonoured, with not even a farewell from the host. They’d had to make their own way over limp, snoring corpses.

Now the head monk glanced at the cremation pit, then over to the river. In the distance, a bird was gently floating against a background of frost. His eyes glinted in eerie flashes of lightning; his mouth again curved in a smile.

The boy received the torch from the master of ceremonies and wordlessly climbed the stone steps to the crematorium. At the end of autumn, he was due to turn fifteen. After gathering the last armfuls of rice stalks from the...