Beautiful Ghosts (7 page)

Too late Shan recognized the metallic rumble. As he grabbed Lokesh’s arm the thunder roared to a crescendo and a huge whirling blade appeared beyond the ledge, slowly rising to reveal the sleek dark grey body of one of the helicopters used by the army. Everyone seemed to be screaming, scattering in every direction but that of the machine. Jara stumbled through the stream below and began racing toward his niece as his wife gathered the other children. Dawa herself leapt up and frantically ran, not toward her uncle, but along the slope in the opposite direction.

Shan pushed Lokesh back toward the ruins and ran to Gendun’s side as the machine paused, hovering a few feet above the ground. As he grabbed the lama and pulled him to his feet half a dozen troops in combat gear dropped out of the helicopter.

Shan and his friends ran, stumbling, tripping over rocks, Shan repeatedly stopping to help Gendun, pulling him forward, struggling because Gendun seemed unwilling to hurry, seemed not frightened but curious about the troops. Suddenly Lokesh, three steps in front of them, halted and stared back at the old stone tower.

Shan turned too, confused. The troops were not chasing anyone, not even Gendun, who wore a robe. Surya was standing on the open ledge, facing the helicopter, arms still raised, palms open, as if in greeting. The soldiers surrounded him, rifles at the ready, pausing as one soldier pressed his hand to his ear. Then, as Shan watched in horror, the soldiers closed about Surya, breaking off the leather neck strap that held his paints, pulling him from the rock and shoving him toward the helicopter, lifting him roughly into its bay. A moment later the soldiers had followed Surya inside the machine. It ascended, veering northward.

The panic did not depart with the soldiers. No one stopped running. The cries of fear did not cease. Some figures resumed their flight down the slope to the west, others retreated toward Zhoka. Dawa was alone, high on the opposite slope now, not bothering to stop to look for her family, running frantically toward the snowcapped mountains on the southern horizon, her uncle now sitting on the ground far behind her, holding his ankle as if he had injured it.

Shan walked in a daze toward the rock where Surya had stood, staring numbly at the heavy bootprints in the soil around the rock and the pigment vials that had been crushed by the boots, stepping past them to gaze over the dropoff. The helicopter was out of sight. The army had struck like lightning, then vanished into the sky.

“No one will ever see him again,” a thin voice said over Shan’s shoulder. Liya turned, dropped to one knee, and began scanning the southern landscape with her battered binoculars, as if looking for someone who would be climbing the slope above Zhoka. After a moment she rose and sighed. “Two months ago in Lhasa a man unfurled a Tibetan flag outside the military headquarters,” Liya said. “A Public Security helicopter took him over the mountains and when it landed he was not inside. It’s a way they have for dealing with political embarrassments. They don’t bother with trials for people like Surya. He is a…” Her voice drifted away.

He is a what? Shan wondered. Shan had known Surya as a monk artist, an old Tibetan with a joyful, serene smile like that often worn by Gendun. But Surya had called himself a killer.

“It was as if he were waiting for them,” Shan said. “As if he expected soldiers.” Surya had run to the tower, obliterated something written under the old painting, and waited for the troops. Yet even if a murder had occurred, the soldiers could not possibly have known.

Liya wiped a tear from her cheek. “It’s my fault. I told those strangers about the festival and the army came searching. They found one of our illegal monks.”

But Shan wasn’t so certain. Troops had come, but they had ignored Gendun, had ignored the illegal festival, the fleeing Tibetans. Surya had indeed seemed to have expected them, and they him. The hermit artist who knew nothing about the outside world, who had spent all the years since his boyhood inside Yerpa, without seeing modern machines or soldiers or guns, or even a Chinese until Shan had arrived a year earlier, had let Chinese soldiers take him into a helicopter. “They didn’t take him because he was a monk,” Shan said. “He had no robe on.”

Liya looked at Shan with pain in her eyes, as if his words only added to her despair. Shan studied her a moment. “When that herder wanted to take me for the bounty what did you mean when you said I had the protection of your clan?” He knew nothing of her family.

“The people of these hills share many things,” Liya said in a tight voice.

Shan recalled how Liya sometimes stared at the distant mountains with a haunted, lonely expression and realized how little he knew about her. “Have you been inside, in the tunnels of Zhoka?” he asked.

But Liya stepped away, back toward the old tower.

When he caught up with her she was beside Lokesh, staring at the paintings.

“I tried to speak with Surya when he was running here,” Liya said. “He had said something to Gendun, had given him something, but wouldn’t speak with me. I kept asking him to turn back, reminding him of all the people who need him now.” Her voice was low and quivering, and she seemed to be struggling to hold back more tears. They followed Lokesh’s gaze into the shadows, where Gendun now knelt, studying the painting. “But finally he stopped and put a hand on my shoulder and shook me, saying if we are to save Zhoka we must go to refuge.”

Shan looked at Liya again. She acted as if she and Surya were close, as if there where others, outside the hermitage, who needed Surya. He gazed back at the remains of the old gompa. “There are only ruins at Zhoka.”

Liya followed his gaze. “Not for him.”

“Not for those in refuge.” Lokesh spoke from behind Shan’s back. As he turned toward his old friend, Shan grasped the words. Surya had not been saying they must hide, he had been referring to the sacred refuge of Buddhist ritual, the place of enlightenment.

“Surya spoke to me of a place of power he had found, on a ridge, used by Zhoka,” Lokesh said suddenly. “This must be the place.” He was touching the stone by the low entryway, intensely studying the pattern of lichen that grew on it, looking, Shan knew, for the religious symbols that sometimes could be discerned in the patterns of nature. “Surya told me he always looked for those that had been neglected, as if it were his job to restore them.”

Shan surveyed the landscape again and realized that Lokesh was right. The lower alcove of the tower, formed of the natural rock formation, was sheltered from the north and opened to sweeping vistas to the south, toward the snowcapped peaks of the horizon. A ragged but sturdy juniper tree stood a hundred feet down the slope by the spring that bubbled out of the mountain. Lokesh looked at the lichen again, running a finger over a pattern like a wheel. “He said there were deities to be raised.”

“Someone died in a chamber under the ruins.” Shan explained what he had found beneath the surface of Zhoka.

“The little fresco room,” Liya said in a whisper.

“You know it?” Shan asked.

Liya closed her eyes as if in silent grief. “Someone died,” she said, eyes still shut, “Surya thought he was responsible. He burned his robe.” She spoke slowly, as if to be very careful to recite the correct sequence. “Then he came here, to the old painting.”

“Because,” Shan said, just as slowly, “he had given up on saving himself. He was interested only in saving Zhoka.”

Lokesh gazed into the shadowed rocks. “This is the kind of place where messages are sent to deities. I think the Surya who wore a robe may have come here if he thought his friends were in jeopardy,” he said with an uncertain voice. None of them knew the Surya who had shed his robe.

Shan stepped beside Gendun, who was examining the old painting, running his palm across it, an inch above the surface, as though he were reading it through his hand.

“I don’t recognize the image,” Shan said. “It is Tara, but I have never seen this form.”

“Even in the old days it was uncommon,” Gendun explained. “It is one of the eight forms of the Holy Mother who protect against fears and demons. This is Kudri Padra. Surya was trying to awaken her.”

Shan looked at him with a blank expression.

Lokesh stepped from one side of the painting to the other, staring at it as if he had not truly seen it before, then nodded. “It is the Thief Catcher Tara,” he said with surprise in his voice.

Gendun, still gazing at the painting, nodded his head slowly.

“It’s all so wrong,” Liya interjected in a bitter voice. “A disaster. It will be years before we can try again.”

“There was a little girl,” Shan reminded her, still watching Gendun. The lama had withdrawn into himself, the way he acted when meditating, but Shan knew it was not a place of serenity he had gone to this time. “She learned how to celebrate with flour. She learned how to listen to the throat chanting.”

Liya winced. “She learned how to run from soldiers,” she added in a hollow voice. “And now one of our throat chanters is lost. You know how few are left, trained in the old ways of the chanting, who learned directly from the lamas who lived a hundred years ago? They’re nearly extinct. There’s more snow leopards in Tibet than such men. They will all be gone when the soldiers finish.”

“The girl asked about souls and was answered by fear,” Lokesh said. “She fled like a frightened antelope.” He gazed southward, toward the endless mountains, range after trackless range rolling to the horizon, then turned back toward Shan. “He didn’t just speak to Tara. For a moment I heard a prayer, asking the guardians for forgiveness.” Shan suddenly recalled the nine-headed deity in the room with the blood, whose eyes had been put out. Surya had asked for forgiveness, as if he had been responsible for the blinding.

“Surya couldn’t kill,” Liya said in a voice like a whimper. “I spoke with him, two nights ago. He gave me prayers to keep me safe when riding my horse at night. He could have gone into the tunnels and hit his head. He could have imagined … but the blood, all the blood. It can’t be, he is our monk.”

Her strange soliloquy had broken Gendun out of his contemplation. He was looking at Liya with an expression Shan had never before seen on the lama’s face. A sad, tormented confusion. Before Shan could react, Gendun stepped away to stand on a ledge that overlooked Zhoka.

He looked back at Liya. None of them could explain the blood. And Dawa had seen a man with a nail through his body, an hour after Surya’s strange words.
Here you must be nailed to the earth,
the monk had proclaimed.

“Two nights ago Surya did not come to the chorten,” Shan said. “Where did you see him?” Liya turned away, toward Gendun. “Who else was in the hills?” Shan pressed. “You saw foreigners last night. Who did you see the night before?” Shan stepped close to her back. “Jara said there are people who will kill for a word. He would not speak it. What word?”

Liya spun about to face him, her jaw clenched, as if afraid to speak, and backed away.

As Gendun settled onto the ledge Shan approached him, sitting three feet away. He watched the clouds scud westward. He found himself looking not at Zhoka but beyond it, toward Yerpa. There was a small cell in the old hermitage where he had been made comfortable, given cushions and blankets from the ancient storerooms, where he had spent the most peaceful months of his entire life. He wondered if he would ever see it again.

They sat in silence for a quarter hour as Liya and Lokesh gathered some of the belongings the hill people had left scattered across the slope. Gendun did not move, did not offer a mantra, did not touch his mala, his prayer beads, only folded his hands together, palms down, middle fingers raised against each other. It was the diamond of the mind mudra, for focus, for trying to find the center of things. A small blue butterfly landed on the rock between them. Shan watched as Gendun’s eyelids fluttered. His eyes found the butterfly, then Shan.

“You are going to ask what he gave me,” the lama said in a near whisper, then handed Shan a crumbled strip of cloth, torn from the grey muslin of an underrobe. “He told me to repeat it ten thousand times, to keep him from coming back.”

Shan read the words scrawled on the cloth.
Om Amrta Hum Phat.
It was a mantra for expelling what the Tibetans called hindering demons.

“Keep who from coming back?” he asked.

“Himself,” Gendun sighed. “Surya.” The lama searched Shan’s face, his eyes filled with a mournful confusion. “I can find no balance in what happened today,” he said. “Something crushed Surya’s deity.”

Shan remembered the little statue Atso had with him. The butterfly walked to the edge of the rock and appeared to be staring at the ruins below.

Gendun seemed to follow the gaze of the butterfly. “It is one of the oldest temples in all of Tibet. Before it was built demons roamed freely across the earth. People forget that. People forget the important things.”

“I thought it was known for its artists.”

“What is the work of artists? To invoke deities. It takes a deity to fight a demon. It is how our artists are made.”

Shan gazed at the ruins. It was the way of most of his conversations with the lama, who used short sentences to punctuate long silences, which with Gendun were always more important than words. “You mean if Surya killed something it was a demon.”

Gendun looked back at the butterfly, and when at last he spoke it was toward the fragile little creature. “The demon was in the killing,” he said. “A killing is the same act, on the killer and the killed. It just affects them in different ways.”

“Did you always know about Zhoka, Rinpoche?” Shan asked.

“No,” Gendun admitted, offering a small nod to Shan, as if conceding a point. For decades the monks of Yerpa had been wary of venturing more than a mile from their hermitage. “Once there were many gompas in Lhadrung, now many ruins. We did not know how different Zhoka was from the other ruins. It had been kept secret from the rest of the world, for good reason. But Surya found an old book in a cave high in the mountains, wrapped in fur as if it were hibernating. He was so excited. It explained the things that had happened here.” He bent low to the butterfly. “Zhoka made the earth quake,” he whispered to the fragile creature.