The Ferry

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Ebba, Phuntsho and the ship are invented. The crossing from Stockholm to Helsinki is a real overnight route, and what is said about Bhutan and about the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

Two in the morning

Ebba Holm was twenty-six, a horn player, and awake. At two in the afternoon, in a hall in Helsinki, she would walk out alone behind a screen and play for a jury that would hear her and not see her. It was the first round of an audition for an orchestra job she had wanted for years.

She had taken the night ferry from Stockholm because she thought a night at sea would calm her. The ship had left in the late afternoon, slid out through the islands of the Stockholm archipelago in the last of the light, and called at Mariehamn, on the Åland Islands, around midnight. None of it had calmed her.

Her cabin was an inside one, low in the ship, with no window. The horn case lay on the other bunk like a sleeping passenger. Her heart was doing something it was not supposed to do.

Stage fright takes most people the same way: a racing heart, a dry mouth, trembling. A pianist can play through shaking hands. For a horn player those are the very things that make the sound. The lips buzz in the mouthpiece; the breath sets the pitch. And near the top of the horn the notes stand so close together that a hair too much or too little and the note cracks, in front of everyone.

She took the spare mouthpiece out of her coat pocket and buzzed a long, quiet note into it, as she did every night of her life. Her lips shook. She put on her coat and went up.

The man at the rail

The open deck at the stern was wet and empty and very cold. October. Behind the ship the wake ran away pale into the dark, and above it there were more stars than she had seen since she was a child.

It was not quite empty. At the far end of the rail stood an old man in a dark coat and a knitted cap, speaking quietly to the sea.

Her first thought was that he was ill, or drunk, or on the phone. Then she heard that it was rhythm. A low, even voice, rising at the start of each phrase and settling at the end, the same shape again and again, like rope paid out hand over hand.

She stood by the door and listened for a long time before she noticed that she had stopped counting her own heartbeats.

Seven

When he finished he turned, saw her, and apologised, as if he had been singing in someone's kitchen.

His name was Phuntsho. He was sixty-eight, from Bumthang, in the middle of Bhutan. He had come to Stockholm at fifty-seven to cook for two years in a friend's restaurant, and had stayed eleven. In the morning he would fly home: two flights, the second down between the mountains into the valley of Paro.

“Bhutan has no sea,” he said. “Tonight I wanted to say goodbye to it.”

She asked what he had been saying. A prayer, he said, to Guru Rinpoche, the teacher of the eighth century also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, whom Tibetans and Bhutanese remember for helping Buddhism take root in their mountains. The traditional accounts say he came to Bumthang itself, and that in a cave there, where the temple of Kurjey now stands, he left the print of his body in the rock.

It is called the Seven-Line Prayer. Phuntsho gave her its sense in a few words: it remembers where Guru Rinpoche came from and how he was born in a lotus, names him, and at the end asks him to come. “Like calling someone in,” he said, “when it is getting dark.”

“Again?” said Ebba. “Please.” He said it again, and she counted on the rail with one finger.

“Seven,” she said. “Every line is seven.” Seven syllables to a line, the way it is chanted, and one short sound before the very first, on its own. “That's an upbeat,” she said. “Like a conductor's breath before you come in.” He laughed. In sixty years, he said, he had never once counted.

Fear

She told him about the screen, and the first note, and the crack. He listened with his head on one side, the way he must once have listened to orders in a busy kitchen.

Then he told her his. He was afraid of going home. Eleven years. People he knew would be old, or gone. His sister had kept his room, but he did not know whether he would be a guest in his own valley now. “In Stockholm I was the man from Bhutan,” he said. “At home I will be the man who went away.”

They looked at the wake for a while. Neither of them offered the other any advice, which Ebba found she was grateful for.

Breath

“In an orchestra,” she said, “you don't start together by counting. The conductor breathes in, and everyone breathes with them, and then you come in together. You follow the breath.”

He nodded slowly. At home, he said, in the temple, the chant leader, the umdzé, begins alone, and everyone else comes in behind him. As a boy he had stood at the back of the courtyard at festivals and followed the sound for years before he understood a word of it. “I followed the sound first,” he said. “The meaning came behind. Slowly. Like an old man on a path.”

Tea

By three they were too cold to talk, so they went inside to the café, which was open and nearly empty. Phuntsho had a dented steel thermos of butter tea, made in his Stockholm kitchen the afternoon before. He poured some into a paper cup for her.

Ebba tasted it. “It's soup,” she said. “Salty soup.” He was delighted, as if she had paid it a compliment.

He said the prayer every night, he told her. In Stockholm he had said it in a hotel laundry at five in the morning, among the dryers, because it was warm there. He did not suggest that she should say it. She did not ask to learn it. It did not seem to be that kind of conversation.

The sixth line

At four they went back out. The sky had cleared further, and the cold had a sharper edge.

She asked which line he liked best. He thought about it. The sixth, he said: the one that wishes to follow in Guru Rinpoche's footsteps. “I am sixty-eight,” he said. “I have been following since I was six. I am still very far behind.” He seemed to find this funny.

He said the prayer once more for the sea, and she rested her hand on the rail beside his and tapped the seven quietly, as if she were marking a score.

She did not understand a single word. She closed her eyes and let the sound go past her. What she heard was the thing she spent her life trying to do: a sound that did not hurry and did not apologise. Once, on the cold, his voice cracked. He went on as if nothing had happened.

She did not know that a nineteenth-century Tibetan commentator, Mipham, wrote of this prayer as if it were made of sound itself. She only knew that the sound held.

Dawn

At first light the ship was threading through the islands off the Finnish coast: low, rounded granite, pink and grey, with small pines and here and there a red wooden cottage on the shore. Mist lay in the channels. The sea was flat as a plate.

She went down for the horn and asked him whether he minded. He did not mind. She stood at the rail and played long tones, softly, the way horn players begin every day: one note held, then the next.

Her first note cracked. She stopped, laughed at herself, breathed, and began again. Phuntsho stood with his hands in his coat pockets and listened the way you listen to weather.

Helsinki

The ship slid past the old sea fortress of Suomenlinna on its islands and came in to the harbour in clear, cold light. On the quay he was suddenly a different shape: he had changed into his gho, the knee-length robe Bhutanese men wear, belted at the waist, his navy coat open over it. “You can't go home in a jumper,” he said.

They shook hands. She walked up into the city with the horn case on her back. He went to find a taxi to the airport.

What happened behind the screen that afternoon belongs to her, and this story does not know. Somewhere over Asia, a man in a gho was saying seven lines of seven syllables to a small oval window, very quietly, with nothing beyond it but cloud.