Soul of the Fire (10 page)

“And the Commission was formed.”

“He said he would reward us by including us in his plans.”

In the silence that followed, the sound of clinking glasses and laughter reached them. There was an open-air terrace on the top of the Party house.

“You were there when Xie died.”

Kolsang took a long time to respond. “Xie had a bad heart. He knew that, and took great care. Medicine every morning. He had much to live for. He made a difference in the lives he touched.”

“You don't think it was a heart attack.”

The Tibetan ignored Shan's suggestion. “I said we should have a funeral. Madam Choi and Major Sung said we would, but they want to plan it, to make it special.” His voice seemed to have an edge of warning in it.

“Did you know Xie's body is missing?”

Kolsang ignored him again. He watched a flight of geese overhead, then rose.

“Where would the body have gone?” Shan asked.

“There's an incinerator by the municipal garage. Sometimes there is greater reverence in a quick disposal.”

“Sometimes there are those who don't want a body examined too closely,” Shan countered.

“Don't strike the flint. Please.”

“Was there a poem at that suicide by the
gompa
? You knew about the poems.”

“You're a good man, Shan, a savvy man. Too much like Xie. Don't throw yourself away like he did. There is nothing you can do. Pao is just a storm passing overhead. He will have his way with us, and then we can go back to our lives.”

*   *   *

The next morning, Shan stood in the shadows by Zhongje's north gate, watching for the perimeter patrol. It was nearly dawn and the only traffic was that of Tibetans preparing for the little open-air market along the outside wall and the night laborers departing the town. As he watched, Judson and Hannah Oglesby appeared, binoculars hanging from their necks, bound for one of their early morning walks with nature on the lower, more verdant slopes. The moment they disappeared, half a dozen of the night workers converged on the public bulletin board where the government posted official notices. They crowded around one particular notice, and Shan saw now that another man was positioned on the bank along the other side of the road, keeping watch for the patrol as they read. Several of the Tibetan vendors joined them, then suddenly the watcher whistled and the small crowd instantly dispersed. Shan turned to see two constables walking along the wall. He stepped out of the shadows to reach the board ahead of them.

The piece of paper had been taped over a Party poster. He read the first few lines, glanced at the approaching patrol, and ripped the page away, stuffing it inside his shirt as he continued up the road. He wandered along the row of vendors, pausing to buy a little baked clay
tsa tsa,
an inch-high image of a saint, then slipped around the corner of the wall to examine the paper in the first rays of dawn. It was a photocopy of four more death poems, handwritten in Tibetan with names below each. He recognized the names from the Commission files. He read them with a shudder, remembering the terrible visions of charred bodies that had troubled his sleep since arriving in Zhongje.
All of time collects to create this one stroke of lightning,
the first simply said. The others were couplets:

In stillness and fire

I embark to the other side.

I worried I was nothing

but now I become a beacon to all the world.

This is how I cauterize the wound

Where I sever the world.

The poems held him in their grip for long painful minutes, then suddenly he saw the janitor with the stubbled jaw walk by at a weary pace and remembered why he had risen so early. He waited until the old man disappeared over the rise in the road, then began briskly walking toward the Tibetan village. Moments later he froze at the sound of running feet behind him, certain the patrol had spotted him.

“You're going there, aren't you?” Tuan panted as he reached Shan's side. He was wearing a white shirt and tie. “I mean the town of ghosts.”

“I am going to Yamdrok,” Shan answered, glancing at the old Tibetan ahead of him, who had stopped to speak with a farmer leading a donkey cart.

“I enjoy a good walk in the morning.”

“You have Religious Affairs written all over you.”

“I'll be with you,” Tuan replied, as if Shan were a disguise.

“Surely you've heard the tales about the wind fangs. Officials going to Yamdrok get blown onto the spikes below the cliff.”

Tuan sagged. After a moment he pulled off his tie and shoved it into his pocket.

“You were chastised for not knowing where I was yesterday morning.”

Tuan looked back at the Tibetan market that stretched out along the town wall. “Wait. Please,” he pleaded, then set off at a trot.

Shan busied himself straightening a row of stones inscribed with prayers,
mani
stones, along the side of the road.

Minutes later, Tuan was back, panting and wearing a worn sweater and an old fleece vest. “Look at me,” he said in a mocking tone. “The good Tibetan boy my mother always dreamed of.”

“You smell of Chinese soap and your shoes cost more than many in Yamdrok make in a year.”

“They're American,” Tuan explained.

Shan studied his companion for a moment, then took off his
gau,
the Tibetan prayer amulet he wore around his neck, and looped it around Tuan's neck. “Leave it outside your shirt, for all to see,” he instructed before continuing toward the village. The aged janitor had climbed into the farmer's cart. As they reached a curve around the east side of the mountain, Zhongje disappeared behind them. They crossed a low ridge, and fields of barley came into view. Men carrying sickles and women carrying food baskets were moving into the fields, ready for the day's harvest. On the slope above was a large overgrown orchard that must once have served the abbey. Half its trees were dead or dying, but the others held apples and apricots. Several children were running among them, gleefully gathering fruit that had fallen in the night.

“It's like we passed through some gate in time,” Tuan said in a near whisper. “Not a machine in sight. It could be another century.”

Shan surveyed the landscape populated by farmers with iron tools, donkey carts, derby-hatted women, and adolescents carrying wooden pails of milk. “Time is a great deceit, a lama once told me,” he replied. “He told me never to trust those who marked it by accumulating devices of plastic and wire, for they tended to think they were better than those who came before. He preferred to live among real things, among those who knew no time.”

“I don't understand.”

“That was my own response. So the lama lifted a plastic bucket and said carry this, and you carry the chemicals and factories of this century. He lifted a wooden pail and said, carry this and you are the novice taking water to the first lamas of Tibet, or the boy watering the yaks of a salt caravan four hundred years ago.” Shan gestured to a man who appeared on a sputtering motorbike, heading toward the government complex, then to those in the fields. “It is one of the joys of Tibet. You can pick your century.”

His words quieted Tuan, and they walked in silence. Shan kept an eye on the old janitor. Tuan watched the fieldworkers. Tiled and planked roofs came into view, many covered with moss, below thin columns of smoke.

“These are the dreaded fangs?” Tuan scoffed. “Killers of intruding officials?”

Shan followed Tuan's gaze toward a narrow gully that rose up from the road toward the summit. Spires of rock several feet high marked the mouth of the gully.

“One of the Tibetans who works in town said a dragon had raked the mountain with his claw,” Tuan said in an amused voice. “Not so dangerous after all.”

The infamous wind was not blowing.

“The danger isn't in the teeth,” Shan said as he stepped to the edge of the cliff, “but in the belly.”

Tuan strutted to the lip and froze. “Damn!” he gasped, and stepped back.

A grisly glimpse of hell waited below. It was nearly three hundred feet to the jagged rocks at the bottom. The remains of a guardrail hung precariously on a jutting rock several feet below them. Bones of a sheep or goat lay on a ledge that jutted from the cliff halfway down. Tuan kicked a stone and watched as it plummeted to the bottom. “A truck,” he said, pointing first to wreckage near the cliff face, then a little farther out. “And at least two cars. I wonder how many bodies?”

The wreckage seemed to disturb the Religious Affairs officer. He stared at it in a brooding silence until Shan pulled him away.

The village was larger than Shan had expected, and surprisingly traditional for being so close to the prison and government compound. It was in its own way remote—hidden behind the mountain, out of sight of its neighbors, and at the end of a rough road that led to nowhere else. As they passed the first worn buildings, he saw half a dozen men who seemed prematurely frail—and then he understood. Yamdrok wasn't ignored by the prison and the officials, it was used as a dumping ground. Former prisoners would often not be given travel permits, so they could not travel outside the township in which they were released. The men had been prisoners, probably for decades, and when they were deemed harmless enough, they were left to die in Yamdrok.

“Ai yi!”
Tuan gasped as a ghost stepped out of an alley between the first two stone buildings. He stepped behind Shan as the pale woman moved into the sunlight. Her hands, arms, and face were bright white. She stopped to untie and shake the cloth that covered her black hair, raising a small white cloud. A young girl appeared behind her, a heavy sack on her shoulder.

Shan grinned at the Religious Affairs officer. “It's the old way of making barley flour. The village must have a stone grinder shared by all.” He turned and greeted the woman in Tibetan. She backed away, urgently gesturing the girl toward the center of town.

He pressed on, keeping the old janitor in sight, pausing only to let a cart of firewood past before reaching the small central square, where a woman filled a bucket at a water pump. The old man chatted jovially with the woman for a few moments, then crossed the square and continued down a road that led to a solitary farmhouse.

“Breakfast,” Shan suddenly proposed, and led Tuan toward a building where men sat at tables in the cool morning, sipping tea. It was not so much a café as a smoky kitchen with extra seats. At the back wall, a plump grey-haired Tibetan in a dirty red vest tended a copper pot of porridge on a brazier. His uncertain gaze grew worried as Shan sat down. The patrons all stopped eating.

“Lha gyal lo,”
Shan said to the upturned faces, then called for two bowls of porridge.

Conversation started again, though only in whispers now. A rough-looking man with a scarred face held up fingers on either side of his mouth and pursed his lips, blowing hard, his mimicking of the wind fangs raising guffaws from his companions. An old woman adjusted her chair to put her back to them. Two others abruptly rose and left the café.

Tuan frowned as Shan enthusiastically ate the coarse barley porridge darkened with bits of husk. “I thought you wanted to taste another century,” Shan taunted him. The young Religious Affairs officer winced, cast a skeptical glance at his worn wooden spoon, and stabbed it into his bowl. As they ate, Shan studied the chamber. It was very old, with vestiges of the separate world that had been Tibet. Old hand-sized prayer wheels with worn wooden handles lay on a shelf. A ten-year-old calendar with a photograph of the Potala hung on one wall, a framed photo of Mount Kailash, most sacred of pilgrimage sites, on another. A weathered butter churn stood in a corner beside several old flailing sticks.

Shan glanced back at the brazier and saw that the proprietor had disappeared. “What you need is something truly Tibetan,” he declared to Tuan. “Wait here. Don't leave until I return.” He quickly rose and ventured through the darkened doorway at the rear of the room.

He followed the sound of dishes out the back door and found the owner washing bowls in a wooden bucket. The man looked up suspiciously, then brightened as Shan produced a currency note. “Please prepare my friend some buttered tea at the table.”

“At the table?”

“He wants to understand the whole process. Take a brazier to him. Heat the milk. Soften the butter. Measure the salt. Take your time. Make a ceremony out of it. Don't let him dissuade you. His mother was Tibetan. He wants to learn her old ways.” Shan added a few coins to the proprietor's hand.

The man grinned and pocketed the money.

Shan left the proprietor and followed the road toward the old farmhouse warily, wandering up a path that led to more orchards, pausing to sit on a rock to study the building. It was a very old, traditional house, its faded maroon walls badly in need of repair. A rough rock fence enclosed a small pasture adjoining the rear of the house where a goat and two sheep grazed. Beside a shed at the back of the pasture was a new-looking
tarchen,
a high pole on which a long prayer flag was fastened vertically. A strand of smaller prayer flags fluttered from a rope strung from the pole to the shed.

He admired the little house. Painted dragons, weathered almost to bare wood, were carved into the ends of the roof beams. A traditional sun resting on a crescent moon greeted those who approached the front door. Seeing no sign of its inhabitants, he approached and knocked on the red door, which was slightly ajar. When no one answered, he inched the door open and took a single step inside.

The old janitor, sitting on the floor before a bronze Buddha, seemed to take no notice of him. When the man finally spoke, it was toward the little deity. “A high-ranking official visiting my humble home. I should rise and kowtow.”