The Lady and the Monk Read Free

a dream of strange displacement. No other pedestrians walked these midnight streets; no cars purred through the ghosted dark. Only occasionally could I catch the distant murmurs of some secret entertainment. Then, as the first speckles of rain began prickling my arms, I hurried back into the temple. All night long, the rain pattered down on wooden roofs, and I, now sleeping, now awake, sat alone in the darkened shrine, not really knowing where I was.
    The next morning, when I got up and made my way uncertainly out to the altar room, the monk bustled up to greet me. The first item on the agenda was a guided tour. And the first stop on the tour was what appeared to be the only piece of decoration in the place: a framed photograph of himself, seated atop a tricycle, looking astonished, a bobble hat on his shaven head and a Mickey Mouse shirt under his alabaster face. “This me,” he explained. “I am Buddhist monk.” Then, in the same provisional tone, he proceeded to recite the American sites he had seen — “San Francisco, Los Angeles, Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, San Antonio, El Paso, New Orleans, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Buffalo.” Then he led me to a low table, overlooking the temple garden, and vanished.
    A few minutes later, my bewilderment now almost mirroring his own, he hurried in again and laid down before me a black lacquer tray filled with elegant little bowls of vegetables, fruit, pickles, and rice; later, a toaster, some bread, and a thermos of hot water for my tea. Then he disappeared again.
    I was just beginning to enjoy the feast, looking out upon thegreen and silver stillness, when suddenly his astonished-looking face appeared again, speeding through the garden atop a motorized contraption. He rode up to the room where I was sitting, looked astonished some more, waved like a queen, and then roared away again in a minicloud of smoke. The next thing I knew, he was at my door, on foot this time, peering in with a hesitant smile. “Tricycle,” he said, pointing at the offending instrument, Mickey and Minnie grinning on its license plate. With that, he disappeared.
    My second day, as I sat in the alcove looking out onto the other garden — a stream, a wooden bridge, a stone lantern, and, beyond, Yasaka Pagoda rising through the trees — the second, and only other, monk of the temple, an older man, with the breathless, frightened voice of a perennially bullied schoolboy issuing from a spherical wrestler’s body, padded over to me. He spoke even less English than his colleague, but that did not seem to matter, since his was not a verbal medium. Huffing and puffing, but without a word, he sat down beside me and pulled out six sheaves of snapshots: himself (wide-eyed) in front of the Taj Mahal; himself (bemused) on a bridge above the Thames; himself (bewildered) on llle de la Cité; himself (perplexed) on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna; and himself with a variety of other scenic wonders. Then, show complete, he trudged away again.
    A eunuch and an albino: the monks with whom I was living were the strangest-looking pair that ever I had seen, and a cynic, no doubt, would have had no trouble explaining why they had turned their backs on the world before the world could turn its back on them. Yet they were an eminently kindly pair, and peaceable, and I began in time to think of them as good companions. Every morning, as I took my seat in front of the rock garden, they laid before me a four-course breakfast, and every morning — with a thoughtfulness and precision I could imagine only in Japan — they gave me something different. Every evening, when I went out, I found them squashedtogether on the floor, at a tiny table in a tiny room, drinking beer before some TV ball game. “Catch you later,” the albino monk would call out after me, waving his bottle merrily in my direction, chalky white legs protruding from tomato-red shorts.
    The area where I had settled down was, by happy chance, one of