Murder on the Silk Road (12 page)

“Okay,” said Victor after he had answered some questions from the audience. “Onward to Cave 16. I’ll tell you about Sir Aurel Stein when we get to the top.” Turning, he led the way up the rock-cut staircase.

The cave was the lowest in a group of three, one on top of the other. It was sheltered by an entrance façade that was similar to that of the Cave of Unequaled Height but not as grand: a glazed tile roof with upturned eaves supported by redpainted columns. After climbing the stairs, the group assembled in the cave, which Emily had unlocked with a key from a big iron key ring. The cave was quite large and was elaborately painted with figures of Bodhisattvas, which Victor defined as Buddhist deities who had postponed Nirvana in order to help others on the path to enlightenment. A group of garishly painted statues—Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and guardian warriors—occupied a horseshoe-shaped dais at the back of the cave. These must have been the statues that Wang had been setting up when he had accidentally discovered the secret library. An opening in the wall on their right appeared to be the entrance to the secret library.

Victor stood in front of the dais, the light from the entrance illuminating his pale face. Flanking him were Emily and Chu, who had also joined the tour. “Now we come to Stein,” he said, picking up the thread of the story. “Sir Aurel Stein was a British explorer of Hungarian descent who had already made several expeditions to Central Asia when he visited the caves in 1907. Upon his arrival, he heard a rumor about a hidden deposit of ancient manuscripts. He was eager to question Wang about this, but Wang was away on a begging trip. Returning to the caves a few months later, after the monk had returned, Stein decided on a two-pronged strategy to gain Wang’s confidence. The first was to express admiration for his efforts at restoring the caves.” Victor turned to point at the statues. “If you’ll take a look at the statues behind me, which Wang commissioned as part of his restoration, you’ll see that this must have required more than a bit of dissimulation. The second strategy was to draw parallels between his own explorations and those of the Chinese monk Hsuan-tsang, who had made a pilgrimage to India in the seventh century. It was the second strategy that bore fruit. As it turned out, Hsuan-tsang was Wang’s patron saint, and Stein’s reference to the beloved monk convinced Wang that he should show Stein a sample manuscript from the secret library. By fortuitous coincidence—”

“Fortuitous for the British, disastrous for the Chinese,” interjected Chu. He went on: “I would also like at this point to correct any mistaken impressions that it was the British so-called explorer Aurel Stein who discovered the library. As Comrade Danowski’s lecture has made very clear, the library’s discoverer was the Chinese monk Wang Yuan-lu.”

Victor continued with a look of patient forbearance. He had no choice but to be placatory; he was there only on the sufferance of the Chinese. “By a coincidence that was fortuitous for the British and disastrous for the Chinese, the manuscript that Wang picked at random from the thousands in the cave turned out to be a sutra that Hsuan-tsang had translated himself from originals that he had brought back from India. Impressed by this auspicious omen, the priest proceeded to open the secret library to Stein.”

“Now I’ll read you the pertinent section from Stein’s journal,” Victor continued. Removing a sheet of paper from a folder, he proceeded to read from the entry in Stein’s diary: “‘The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open. Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close to five hundred cubic feet.’ It was,” Victor interjected, “one of the most fabulous archaeological discoveries”—he looked over at Chu—“correction:
finds
, of the twentieth century. Each night,” Victor continued, “Wang would remove a bundle of manuscripts and take them to Stein for further study. Meanwhile, Stein and his group were discussing—”

“They weren’t discussing, they were plotting,” interrupted Chu.

Victor gave his goatee a nervous little tug, and went on. “They … plotted … how to convince Wang to sell them the manuscripts.”

Charlotte could see that this was going to be a very tedious lecture if Chu was going to keep translating it into ideologically pure language. But Victor, who seemed to be accustomed to the interruptions, kept on, somehow managing to ignore Chu without appearing to challenge his authority.

“Finally,” Victor continued, “Stein managed to convince Wang to allow him to remove some of the manuscripts to a ‘certain temple of learning in the distant West,’ which was, of course, the British Museum. In exchange, he offered Wang a donation of silver for the restoration of the caves.”

“In other words, he bribed Wang,” said Chu.

Victor ignored him. “In all, Stein carried off twenty-four cases of manuscripts—thirteen thousand in all—and five cases of paintings, embroideries, and other art objects to the British Museum.”

“The monk sold the cultural heritage of China to the foreign imperialists for a hundred and thirty pounds,” said Chu calmly.

Charlotte was getting tired of Chu’s interruptions. He had made his point. Why not let Victor get on with it? Chu himself must have been getting tired, for, after this last comment, he turned and left, much to their relief. Victor diplomatically refrained from saying anything, but it was clear that Emily was glad that her boss had decided to give them a break.

The lecture now proceeded uninterrupted.

“As you may know, the prize of Stein’s haul was the oldest printed book known to mankind: the
Diamond Sutra
, which was printed in 868
A.D.
It is now on display in the British Museum.” Victor went on to relate the rest of the story: “The next year, another Western explorer, the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot, also persuaded Wang to sell him several cases of artworks and manuscripts; these are now in the collections of the Louvre and the Bibliothèque National in Paris. Pelliot was followed by explorers from Russia, Japan, and the United States. When the Chinese government heard about the foreigners’ purchases, they demanded that Wang ship the remainder of the contents of the secret library to Beijing. But Wang distrusted the government, and justifiably so. Only a few of those manuscripts ever made it to the capital; the rest were lost or pilfered by corrupt officials along the way. In fact, they still turn up from time to time at rare book dealers.”

“Imagine that,” said Vivian Gormley in a loud voice.

“I saw one in Finland just last year,” Victor commented. “But the story doesn’t end there. As it turned out, Wang hadn’t turned all of the remaining manuscripts over to the government. He had shrewdly held back a nest egg of manuscripts that he considered of special value, and when Stein returned several years later, he was able to buy another six hundred manuscripts. After that, the door was closed to Western explorers, but that wasn’t the end of the discovery of ancient manuscripts at Dunhuang. Last year, a Chinese art student who had been restoring a sculpture of an earth god accidentally discovered a cache of manuscripts that had been sealed inside the sculpture’s belly. It appears that these manuscripts had been hidden there by Wang prior to his discovery of the secret library. It was to translate some of these recently discovered manuscripts that the Chinese authorities invited me and my colleague, Marsha Lundstrom, to Dunhuang.”

Victor replaced the sheet with the entry from Stein’s diary in his folder. “Are there any questions?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the inquisitive Vivian. “Are there any other manuscripts still hidden away?” She waved an arm at the statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas on the dais. “Inside these statues, for instance?”

“No one knows,” he replied. “There are twenty-four hundred statues at Dunhuang.” Flicking on his flashlight, he aimed the beam at the hole in the right-hand wall of the cave. “Now we’ll take a look at the secret library.”

6

“We’ll go into the secret library one at a time,” Victor announced. “Then I’ll tell you some more about the scholarly significance of the contents. And then we’ll talk about the frescoes of Dunhuang in general”—he waved an arm at the murals on the walls—“and of this cave in particular.”

One by one, the members of the group stepped up to the hole in the cave wall. “It’s only a hole” and “there’s nothing there” was the theme of their reactions. They were right, Charlotte discovered when her turn came. It was indeed an empty cubicle about ten feet square by ten feet high with some Buddhist frescoes on the walls. But to call it only a hole was a bit like calling the Parthenon only a pile of marble, she thought, as she tried to imagine what it must have been like for Stein to look upon the enormous cache of ancient manuscripts. Instead, the image that floated to the surface of her mind was that of Larry’s body. The still, dusty air inside the cave reminded her of the still, dusty air inside the tent, and she found herself overcome by the urge to bolt. She felt as if she would faint if she stayed in the cave a second longer. It was the same feeling that sometimes overcame her when traffic was backed up in the Lincoln Tunnel.

Lowering her head, she climbed back through the hole and made her way through the group to Victor and Emily. After mumbling an apology, she excused herself and left the cave. Outside, she descended the rock staircase and took a seat on the nearest bench, which was already occupied by Chu. Lowering her head between her knees, she took a couple of deep, slow breaths, and felt the wave of faintness slowly recede.

“Are you feeling better?” asked Chu after she had raised her head back up.

“Yes, thank you,” she replied.

“The caves sometimes have the effect of making people feel faint. I have felt faint on a number of occasions in the caves myself. Especially when I am not feeling well anyway.”

He had the rattly breathing of the heavy smoker, and Charlotte suspected that he probably had emphysema. She nodded. “I think it was seeing Mr. Fiske’s body this morning.” She tried to explain: “Being inside the cave was like being inside his tent. The air in the tent …”

Chu raised his hand as if to say,
Don’t trouble yourself
. Then he cleared his throat and spat on the pavement.

Charlotte found the spitting habits of the Chinese disgusting. But they weren’t surprising. In addition to being constantly subjected to the dusty air, the Chinese all smoked like chimneys.

The broad-faced Chu stared silently out at the cliff wall, his sandal-clad feet planted squarely on the ground and his Mao jacket tightly buttoned up to his neck. “Where are you from in the United States?” he asked after a while.

“I live in New York now, but I’m originally from New England—the state of Connecticut. Have you heard of it?”

Chu nodded his head. “I have a son who’s studying at Boston University. He’s a mathematics major there. He’ll be returning to Dunhuang for the summer tomorrow night. He’ll be working as a guide at the caves.”

“How very nice. Do you have connections in the United States, then?” She added: “I thought you might because of your name.” Western names were becoming popular in China as a result of liberalization—Emily was a typical example—but George Chu belonged to another generation.

“No. No connections. George is the homonym for my Chinese name. I prefer to use it in the company of Westerners. I was educated at an American missionary school,” he explained. “It was there that I picked up the nickname. That was before Liberation, of course.”

Charlotte said nothing. She had already discovered that it was futile to press the Chinese when it came to details about their pasts.

But Chu went on to answer her unspoken question: “I come from a bad class background,” he said.

He said it matter-of-factly, as if saying “I come from the Midwest.”

“My family were supporters of the reactionary Kuomintang regime,” he continued. “My father was one of the officers responsible for overseeing the transfer of China’s national art treasures from Szechuan, where they were stored during the Sino-Japanese War, to the National Palace Museum.”

The irony of Chu’s confidence wasn’t lost on Charlotte: the man who had been railing against Stein for removing artworks from the caves at Dunhuang was the son of the man who had been at least partly responsible for removing China’s greatest art treasures to Taipei.

“We visited there on our way to the People’s Republic,” said Charlotte. She had marveled at the fabulous embroideries, paintings, bronzes, and jades that had once belonged to the collection of the imperial court at Beijing.

“Then you can understand the magnitude of my father’s crime against his country. For this crime I spent eleven years in a reform-through-labor camp. I assembled radios in a factory—ten hours a day, six days a week. In my spare time I studied the works of Chairman Mao.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Charlotte.

“There is nothing to be sorry about.” He removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook one loose. “As a result of my reeducation, I was able to develop my socialist awareness. By learning from the workers, I gradually came to understand the crimes of my class, and was able to shake off the shackles of my bourgeois reactionary upbringing.”

As he raised the pack of cigarettes to his lips, Charlotte noticed that his wrist bore deep, ugly scars, the kind that, in a man who had spent so many years in prison, could only have come from the chafing of manacles, and she realized with a shiver of horror that his other arm had probably been lost to some sort of festering wound.

“I expected the Communists to execute me,” Chu continued as he lit his cigarette, “but they treated me very well. After I was rehabilitated, the Party gave me a good education. I am very lucky to have the opportunity to make up for the past errors of my family in my current position. I owe a boundless debt of gratitude to the Party.”

Charlotte was astonished at how lightly he wrote off the eleven years he had lost to political upheaval, to say nothing of the loss of his arm. She supposed he was better off than some, better off than many, in fact: he was alive, and he had come out of his ordeal with an enviable career. But she suspected that his soul bore scars that ran much deeper than the angry purple brands on his wrist.