"And A Dragon Apparent, about Southeast Asia."
Normally, "Look at that statue" is an irritating remark, but I would have missed the statue if Pico hadn't spoken. Although it was off to one side, it was a three-times-life-size seated figure of an old man with a lined face and piercing eyes, carved in wood, its luminous staring expression somewhat unearthly. He was holding a bulbous scepter. A red cloth bonnet and red cape gave him the look of the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood." The plaque under the figure gave its name as Binzuru (Pindola Bharadvaja) and explained that he was one of only sixteen ar-hats—ascetics and disciples of the Buddha. And Binzuru was "the most widely revered of all the arhats in Japan," and "famous for his mastery of occult powers."
That explained the stare. The small print on the plaque listed instructions for using the statue as a health aid. One was to touch a part of the statue and then, with the same hand, touch a corresponding part of one's own body to promote health or healing.
I touched Binzuru's knee, and my own, to keep my chronic gout away.
"Joseph Conrad had gout."
"Maybe he got it in Africa, as I did. I was horribly dehydrated on a Zambezi trip. I didn't pee for two days. I was in a tent, half delirious. It damaged my kidneys. After that, I had my first attack of gout in my big toe."
"Isn't the light beautiful at this time of day?" Pico said. "What about Hunter Thompson?"
"I saw him when he came to Hawaii. He was always snorting coke or smoking dope or drinking whiskey. He was one of the most timid travelers I've ever known. When he was back in Colorado, he used to call me up at two in the morning. I think he was in pain most of the time."
"He was someone else whom Jann Wenner rescued. Don't you think Jan Morris was at her best when she was writing for Rolling Stone in the eighties?"
Walking downhill along the narrow lanes to the Deer Park again, we evaluated all the men and women who were traveling and writing today, assigning points to those who traveled alone and wrote well, detracting points for attitude, posturing, lying, fictionalizing, or being blimpish.
"And that's Kaidan-in," Pico said, indicating a chalet-like shrine with a meticulously tended garden, the shrubs in bud and some beginning to blossom. As we watched the shrine from its perimeter fence, snow began to fall, the large wet flakes like white blossoms. "I haven't seen snow here for nine years."
"I've heard your father was a guru," I said.
"Wherever could you have heard that," Pico said, and it wasn't a question. "It's true. After he settled in Santa Barbara. It was the 1960s."
"Guru of what?"
"Of the spirit. Of Iyerism, I suppose," Pico said. "Lots of theosophy."
"Isis Unveiled? Madam Blavatsky? Walter Besant? Swami Vivekananda?"
"That kind of thing. The house was full of hippies, thirty or forty at a time, some very pretty girls, listening to him and serving him. Joni Mitchell look-alikes. I was at Eton then. I'd come home from this formal English school, properly dressed, and see them in flowing robes. My father was like one of these Tibetan gods, breathing fire, throwing fireballs and thunderbolts. 'Get me some food!' 'I'm thirsty!' 'Do this! Do that!'"
"Was your mother part of the business?"
"No. I think she found it all a strain."
"You should write about it."
We had returned to the shopping malls of central Nara and were back in the twenty-first century, away from the arhats and the nosy deer and the shrines. We stopped at a Starbucks for coffee.
Pico said, "No one really knew my father. He didn't write. He was a good speaker. Krishnamurti was down the road, in Ojai."
"Another California swami."
"But I give my father credit for being one of the first to take an interest in the Dalai Lama. When the Chinese invaded Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled, no one did a thing. The Chinese just walked in and took over. My father hurried to India, to Dharamsala, in 1960. So I was able to get to know the Dalai Lama when I was very young. That's what I'm writing about now. But the guru story has been told."
We left Starbucks and meandered towards Nara Station.
"Are you going back to Tokyo?"
"No. Tomorrow to Niigata," I said.
"Niigata? That's nowhere."
"There's an international airport there, but a very small one. In Tokyo I got a ticket on a flight from Niigata to Vladivostok. The ferries aren't running because of bad weather in the Sea of Japan."
"A flight to Vladivostok." And perhaps thinking of our earlier talk about A Journey Round My Room, he said, "You'd be able to write a whole book about that."
***
EXPRESS TRAINS FROM KYOTO left every ten minutes for Tokyo. While I waited for the nine A.M. Hikari Express, businessmen crowded the Kyoto newsstands, choosing comic books for the three-hour trip. They hardly looked up when the train passed snow-covered Mount Fuji en route, sitting in the landscape like a vast dessert, the biggest ice cream sundae in the world. I changed trains in Tokyo at noon, crossed the narrow waist of Japan, and arrived in Niigata around two P.M.
The small city was bleak and newish, having been leveled by a tidal wave in 1961. It was also very cold, a freezing wind and sleet blowing from Siberia and across the blackish sea. And as in other provincial towns, the young women of Niigata were fiercely stylish, clicking down the cold streets in tweed jackets, velvet knickerbockers, and stilettoheeled boots. One of these women sold me a new blade assembly for my battery-powered razor, another sold me a scarf, a third sold me a history of the yakuza. I remained in windswept Niigata for two days and then caught the flight to Vladivostok. The plane left in darkness, four hours late.
You'd be able to write a whole book about that, Pico had said. I considered this optimistic statement soon after we were airborne. The flight took one hour and twenty minutes. Most of the passengers were heavy-faced Russian men in long leather coats, and paunchy women in thick sweaters and big boots, all these people looking misshapen and debauched after the Japanese, sleek as seal pups. Tough Russian youths, too, in greasy nylon parkas, who looked like mechanics; they carried duty-free cigarettes and bottles of Baileys Irish Cream. A Russian blonde in a white leather ensemble sat in front of me. A Japanese man in a thick yellow corduroy suit across the aisle. Next to me an Indian man, very fat, with an earring, sunglasses, and a case of samples. No tourists. Thirty minutes into the flight we were given cheese sandwiches and hard candy. No book in that trip, just this paragraph.
We arrived at Vladivostok, eastern Siberia, around midnight, a world of cold and darkness. The end of the line for most of these people, but for me the beginning.
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS
VLADIVOSTOK, so far from Moscow—almost six thousand miles—still retained many of its Soviet trappings: a gesticulating Lenin statue, a decaying GUM store, government offices with patriotic heroes in bronze waving from the roof, and that enduring Soviet trait, stone-faced bureaucracy. It had always been a city of delay and death, and now it was poverty-stricken as well, distant, out of touch, and underfunded. Beset by woolly sea fog, and yellow slush and black snow in early February, it couldn't have looked grimmer when it had been the fearsome railway junction for prisoners and slave laborers, victims of Stalin's Great Purge, sent to be worked to death in the far northern mines of Kolyma and Magadan. Some didn't make it that far. The great poet Osip Mandelstam (and many other prisoners) died in a nearby transit prison. His chief crime had been to write a poem in which he satirized Stalin as a ludicrous brute, in lines such as "His fingers are fat as grubs" and "His cockroach whiskers leer" and "All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer / The murderer and peasant-slayer."