Blue Poppies - Softcover

Falla, Jonathan

 
9780385336802: Blue Poppies
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385336802 ISBN 13: 9780385336802
Verlag: Delta, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Journeying to a remote Tibetan village to help construct a radio post, Jamie Wilson, a former WWII radio operator, falls in love with Puton, a widow banished by her people, but their growing relationship is threatened by the coming of Chinese forces, in a novel set against the backdrop of the 1950s Chinese invasion of Tibet. Reprint.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Falla has written award-winning dramas for stage and film, and has also written criticism, works on ethnography, musicology, travel, and medical journalism, with articles appearing in The Economist and The Times Literary Supplement. As a nurse, Falla has worked with aid agencies, including Save the Children, in countries in crisis all over the world--Nepal, Sudan, Burma, Uganda. He is also a musician and plays the lute in a professional quartet dedicated to Renaissance Spanish, French, Italian, and Shakespearian music.

Jonathan Falla makes his home in Fife, Scotland with his wife and their new baby.

Aus dem Klappentext

la weaves a powerful tale of love and war, exile and homecoming...and of one man s desire to lose himself in a foreign land, only to find himself caught in a time of chaos and change.

Blue Poppies

The year is 1950 and, as the world recovers from the ravages of World War II, the Chinese army is perched on the border of a fragile land awaiting its destiny. Jamie Wilson, a young Scottish wireless operator and veteran of the war, has just arrived in the remote Tibetan village of Jyeko. He has come on business--to establish a radio outpost--but his journey will resonate much more deeply.

Like those who have traveled to this place before him, Jamie, the Ying-gi-li, is mesmerized by the majestic mountain ranges and enigmatic people, but he will also find an uncommon refuge in its unyielding beauty and in the arms of the willful Puton, a young widow cast out by the people of Jyeko. Inexorably drawn together by a shared loneliness, Jamie and Puton disc

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Before the Chinese burned Jyeko village, a tax official from Lhasa stayed there. For years no revenue had reached the capital from that remote corner of Tibet's eastern province of Kham. So, in 1948, Lhasa sent its own collector. It was a four-month journey into ever more resentful districts. But the zealous young man brought his wife and baby daughter, declared his intention to stay for as many years as it took--and was generally hated.

The Lhasan family rented a large but gloomy house in an alley off the marketplace. They had no true friends: the family was not welcome in the better houses, and the husband was too proud to consort with anyone else. So they lived in isolation. The tax official rode about on business with his nose in the air, intruding and questioning, making demands and enemies of the Khampa people. His young wife cared for their baby, the only living thing that returned her natural warmth. She did her best to spin out barely civil conversations with the market traders, and grew sad and quiet at home.

In their second autumn, they heard from Lhasa that her parents had died. Her husband announced that they should make a pilgrimage to a lamasery several days' travel to the northwest, near Chamdo. They took two yaks to carry the baggage, while husband and wife traveled on smartly tacked ponies. Their daughter, now a timorous toddler, rode in front of her mother.

Their departure from Jyeko was observed by a number of people who bore the tax official no love. The little caravan left the village on the Lhasa trail, out past three votive shrines and then through a scattering of small vegetable gardens. Beyond these were stone animal pens. Here stood clumps of squat wind-twisted firs and larches, picketed in sparse pockets of soil and thrusting their roots under boulders for purchase against the gales. Beyond this point, no trees grew, only sorry little barley fields on terraces from which tons of rock had been lifted over centuries.

They moved steadily upstream toward the stark snowfields, traveling alone. Turning northwest, they passed through the shadow of the Grey Ghost, the peak that reared like an enormous hook above Jyeko. On they went, following the steadily narrowing valley floored with smudges of dark green moss among the rounded pebbles.

On the second day, they came to a gorge in which the trail flirted with a precipice above a river. Where the dirt track reached the entrance to the gorge, balks of timber had been laid in rudimentary steps to a narrow rock shelf. This ledge, halfway up the perpendicular cliff, was the only possible means of passing onward above the seething river. It had been used for generations, and the rock face was scratched with imploring prayers. The gray-green surface was damp, greasy with perpetual spray and centuries-old lichens. The ledge was so narrow that the ponies and yaks had barely sufficient room to place their hoofs, and the loads snagged on the wet stone.

The woman had no liking of heights. When she saw where she was expected to ride, her nerve failed and she began to get down from the saddle, the child inside her coat. Her husband turned to see what she was doing, and shouted a curt order to remount immediately, to keep her eyes out of the depths and to follow him. He called that the ponies were used to it; they were more surefooted than she, and should be allowed to find their own way. So she climbed back up, her strength diminishing as rapidly as her nerve. The pony moved ahead, and she managed to raise her eyes and fix them on her husband's back as he rode proud and silent before her. But she could not help seeing ahead of him, to where the ledge gave out. There, for twenty yards, the way consisted of nothing more than slippery tree trunks laid on stakes driven into the rock. She felt sick with fear, a clammy sweat adding to the cold river spray as she fought to keep her eyes up and her hand tight on the rein. They passed beyond the timbers, back onto the rock ledge, and her heart began to steady.

Then she heard, over the boom and hiss of the gorge, a deep scraping sound among the rocks overhead. Before she could comprehend it, her husband and his pony were smashed off the ledge by a clattering swarm of black boulders. He disappeared instantly into the cold billows to their right. A second later, she was struck on the head and the leg, and thought that she, too, was dead, but the blow knocked her in against the rock wall. Her pony, in a spasm of terror, launched itself backwards and vanished, legs flailing, over the edge after her husband.

When her wits returned, she heard her little girl screaming. She tried to stand upright on the slippery ledge to find her child but collapsed. Her leg was broken in two places, crushed by boulders.

She reached Jyeko two days later, draped over one of her yaks. She had somehow contrived to tie her daughter on with ropes so tight that they cut her flesh. The little girl was mute with shock, the woman barely conscious. For once, the villagers were merciful and brought her to the monks. Many weeks later, as the first winter storms were gathering, she and her daughter were back in their house, alone with each other.

The young widow's name was Puton. It was acknowledged privately in the village that she was as good-looking as any woman from Lhasa could hope to be. The Jyeko people, however, had remarked that her brows joined in the middle, a dark smudge of soft down meeting above the bridge of her nose. Before the accident, they had not been sure of the significance of this. Now though, they were certain: she was marked out as dangerously ill-fortuned.

They took Puton to the physician-lama at the monastery. The monk saw the barely suppressed disdain in the villagers' faces and protective pity ran freely in him. His name was Khenpo Nima. He was in his early middle age, a tall, powerfully built man with a shaven head. With gentle ease, he lifted her from the animal while bellowing at the novices to prepare a room in the outbuildings.

For two months he cared for her. The leg was smashed: it would never be good again. Splinters of bone spiked into the nerves of her right thigh, so that, at its slightest movement, her face contorted in agony. Khenpo Nima bound and stretched the limb with wooden splints, laying it on a thick, oily sheepskin. He prepared for her quantities of his best cures, principally an infusion of a rare blue poppy that caused bone quickly to set firm. It was a remedy he alone in Jyeko used: that species of poppy was only known to grow in one near-inaccessible valley beyond Moro-La, so it was expensive to make. But he did not stint its use for Puton.

For several days she was delirious. In the cold, sucking marshes of pain, she surfaced and sank again, terrified of her helplessness. Often, as she came to, she saw the open smile of Khenpo Nima looking down at her. She knew that she was defenseless and dependent; sometimes her hand fastened on his deep-red robe. He brought two village women to tend and clean her when she fouled herself. He saw to it that the little girl was cared for, and brought her each day for Puton to clasp tightly. So they came to trust Khenpo Nima, and when he said it was time for them to return home, Puton went without a murmur of protest. He sent food each day, and told her to rely on him.

Slowly, she recovered her strength, but her spirits seemed gone for good. The old house hardly enlivened her. It was tall and teetering, three stories of wooden rooms clustered like barnacles to a mud-brick core, with steep ladders everywhere, their timbers rotten. Puton could never keep the storeroom clean enough to discourage hordes of crisp brown cockroaches. They rustled across the floors and the sacks of grain, and climbed the walls and ladders to the living room where she would find them running over her...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Delta
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385336802
ISBN 13 
9780385336802
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
227
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Scooter-Deluxe GmbH
https://www.roller.com

Am Schürmannshütt 30
Moers
47441
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781903238554: Blue Poppies

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1903238552 ISBN 13:  9781903238554
Verlag: 11:9, 2002
Softcover