Mandarin Gate (25 page)

“Jamyang told us his story,” Lokesh continued. “It is but for us to understand it. He left us the sutra of his life. We simply need to learn how to read it.”

“It is what I am doing, old friend, in the only way I know how.”

“No. You ride with police. You speak with those who raid our farms. You attack statues. You invite Public Security to beat you. You have learned other ways, Shan. From where you stand if you lose your footing you lose all chance of being human again.”

The words tore at Shan’s heart. They were the words of a gentle Tibetan father to a son who had become so wayward he was in danger of losing his family. They were perhaps the harshest thing Lokesh had ever said to him. Human existence was a precious thing, won only after thousands of incarnations in lower forms, and those who abused it, for whatever reason, would sink to the bottom of that cycle.

Shan had no reply. He only stared into his now empty bowl.

After a long silence Lokesh gestured outside. “There will be meteors,” the old Tibetan said and, seeming to sense Shan’s weakness, extended a hand to help him up.

It was a rare evening, with a gentle breeze stirring the fragrant junipers, the stars shimmering in a cloudless sky. Shan lay back on the blanket Lokesh had stretched over the grass for him, longing for a chance to at least share another meteor shower with his friend, but unable to resist the fatigue that wracked his body. As his eyes fluttered closed he heard the faint murmur of a new mantra. He seemed to hover in the warm suspension just before sleep and a sad smile settled onto his face. This time, he knew, Lokesh was praying for him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lung Tso was strangely subdued when Shan arrived the next day to ask his favor. His question had come not from resentment but confusion.

“Why in hell would you want one of my men to drive along the valley in your truck?”

“Drive, and stop at places I mark on the map, playing with a shovel in the ditches for a while then driving on.”

“And where will you be?”

“He is going to drop me off at dawn behind the monk’s compound at the end of the valley. With one of your motorbikes. Bring the truck back to the stable in town at the end of the day.”

“You’re going to spy on monks.”

“There’s more than meets the eye at that gompa.” Shan stared at the smuggler with challenge in his eye. Lung still had not explained what business he conducted with the monks.

“We have a rule we try to follow. Only have one enemy at a time. That way you can keep an eye on him, make sure he is not creeping up behind you. But you, Shan, you just piss off everyone. You have no instinct for self-preservation. Who’s following your truck?”

Shan kept staring at him.

“That monk Jamyang. You said he is dead.”

“He died the same day as your brother. He convinced your brother to go the convent. He had me stop on the high ridge above there to confirm that your brother’s truck was there. Then we went to his shrine and he shot himself in the head as he sat an arm’s length from me.”

Lung grimaced. “Monks don’t kill themselves.”

“Monks don’t kill themselves,” Shan repeated. He gazed steadily at Lung as he extracted the folded paper from his pocket. There were two dates that were yet to arrive when Jamyang gave this paper to your brother. One was last week. What happened when you took your truck to the border last week?”

“Not a thing.”

“They have to examine papers, open a few cartons to verify contents.”

“They stamped the papers and waved the shipment through.”

“Because you bribed them.”

Lung said nothing.

“I need to know what you do for the monks, Lung.”

“Same thing we always do.”

Shan leaned closer. “What exactly are they smuggling?”

“Boxes. Not good business to look inside a customer’s goods.”

“What size? What did the monks tell you?”

“The monks come to meetings but they don’t do the talking. It’s those Tibetans from the other side.”

“Purbas?”

Lung shrugged. “I don’t know the Tibetan name for outlaws. They usually go across the high mountain passes but the army has heavy surveillance there now. They wanted a test run on a new route. That’s what happened last week.”

“Test run?”

“A couple big boxes.”

“How long?”

“Big enough for a cabinet. I figure they have altars and such they want to protect from Beijing.”

“The next shipment. Did they say to expect the same kind of shipment?”

“The same, sure.”

Shan slowly nodded. “Like I said. I need a favor.”

The leader of the Jade Crows frowned then disappeared into one of the farm buildings. As Genghis appeared, pushing a motorbike, Lung returned and stood by Shan, silently looking out over the abandoned barley fields, not turning when he spoke again. “If you don’t find the bastard who killed my brother then the Jade Crows will. We’ll go through the damned monastery monk by monk. We won’t be so subtle.”

*   *   *

Chegar gompa was a small, nervous shadow of its former self. It had been built for at least two hundred monks but as he watched from the rocks above Shan estimated it currently held no more than thirty. Half its buildings lay in ruin, still bearing the powder marks from the artillery shells that had destroyed them decades earlier. The little village at its front gate also bore signs of shelling, its structures showing a patchwork of repairs.

The wall that had once enclosed the compound like a fortress was in rubble on the north and east sides, giving Shan a clear view into the courtyard. A chorten, its white surface weathered to grey, sat at the rear center of the yard, allowing room for assemblies of monks and the ritual galas of festival days. But now that space held a new creation, a raised pedestal nearly as high as the base of the stupa, bearing a tall pole with the flag of the People’s Republic.

The brush behind him rattled and he turned to see an old woman stepping into the little clearing. She held a sack of grain in one hand, a stone pestle in the other. She began to settle by a worn indentation in the rock when she gasped, startled by his presence.

“I am only passing by,” Shan offered.

The woman seemed about to back away, then her gaze fell on the gau that had slipped outside of Shan’s shirt. “A pilgrim?” she suggested.

“Just a pilgrim,” Shan said.

“A pilgrim in the shadows,” the old Tibetan observed.

Shan took the words as an expression of suspicion, but then the woman sighed. “The only way a pilgrim can be safe in these times is to walk in the shadows like the rest of us.”

She settled onto the ledge and emptied the grain sack into the bowl in the rock. As she lifted her pestle she looked up at Shan. “It’s something my grandmother used to do when she was a cook for the gompa. Every village used to have a rock like this. I come up once a month, to keep the rock alive.”

Shan nodded. “My grandmother used to let me work the bellows on her stove when she made dumplings. She would tell me that no one could say they made their own dumplings unless they made the flour themselves.”

An uncertain smile crossed the woman’s countenance and she silently began grinding the barley kernels. Shan watched her with a strange ache in his heart. The sound of the grinding was like that of a stream flowing over pebbles. A wren lit on the ground and the woman extended a kernel on her palm, which the little bird readily accepted.

“Your grandmother fed many more monks than live here today,” he said after turning back toward the compound.

“They have a difficult time. Most of the monks refused to sign those loyalty oaths and the government was going to close it down, finish the demolition they started so many years ago. But Abbot Norbu came. He saved the monks. He saved the gompa.”

Shan looked back at the courtyard. “He saved it by raising a Chinese flag?”

The woman shrugged. “He saved it. He saves it every month,” she added with a nod toward a nondescript building just outside the gate.

Shan saw monks on the bench by the door of the building, then fought a shudder as a monk emerged from the door, followed by a grey-uniformed officer.

“Public Security comes every month?” he asked as the officer gestured the next monk inside.

“Sometimes the knobs. Sometimes Religious Affairs. Sometimes both.”

Gompas were audited. Gompas had periodic fidelity reviews. Gompas were required to certify allegiance and verify registration of all monks, but Shan had never heard of such a small gompa attracting monthly enforcement visits. “Why so often?” he asked. “What is so special about this gompa?”

When the woman looked up there was a perverse grin on her face.

“Perhaps not the gompa,” Shan ventured. “The village. What did the village do?”

“Ten years ago there was a farmer here whose children came home one day with Chinese names pinned to their clothes. When they told him the teachers would no longer allow them to use their birth names, he decided to start his own classes, at night, after the Chinese teachers were gone. By the time the Chinese found out about it he had become famous in the valley. When they came looking for him he retreated into the mountains, and they arrested a few who had helped him. He came down to help those in trouble with the government. He began guiding Tibetans across the border, past the army patrols. Public Security put a bounty on his head after he took his family to India. He is in the exile government today, an important official. Public Security knows he has relatives here.”

“Any who are monks?”

“One. A nephew named Dakpo.”

“Were any in the gompa arrested?”

“One. But he came back.”

Shan watched the monks nervously waiting on the bench, saw now how those who finished with Public Security reentered the compound and disappeared into one of the buildings. “Arrested for what exactly?”

“Speaking the way a Tibetan should speak,” she replied. Challenge entered her voice. She would speak no more.

Shan murmured his thanks, then slipped down the path toward the village. He stepped into a stable and studied the hamlet through a gap in its plank walls. On the slope behind a farmhouse, out of sight of the knobs, a woman hurried an adolescent girl away with a basket of grain, the reflex of a people used to being harassed by tax collectors. An old man with a wispy beard wearing a black vest sat upright on a chair outside the door of another house, his hand perched on a cane, his head slightly cocked toward the gompa as if listening for something. Two children ran by, chased by a puppy. A woman laughed as a goat pulled a piece of laundry from a clothesline and ran down the street. The old man did not react to any of the movements. He was blind, Shan realized.

He waited as one monk, then another, finished with the knobs, exiting the building without a word to their companions, looking straight ahead, their faces tight with fear. Many such knob squads worked under a quota, so that they would always find someone to be punished. Each of the monks gripped tattered papers in one hand. Examinations always started with a knob scrutinizing identity cards and Religious Affairs registrations, sometimes questioning every line anew.

He saw the despair on the faces of those who sat waiting on the bench. Some of them were young novices but most were old enough to understand that this kind of scrutiny meant the gompa was in grave danger. A few hasty signatures from Religious Affairs and Public Security and all their hopeful prayers, their reverent memorization of thousands of lines of scriptures, all the flames of their offering lamps, would be snuffed out. Padlocks would be mounted on the compound doors. Prayers would be spoken no more, forever.

A thin clear note suddenly split the silence. The monk who had just finished his interview quickened his pace. Another note brought monks out of several gompa buildings. A monk stood by one of the inner doors, ringing a ritual bell. Several villagers hurried to the buckets by the entries to their houses, rinsing their hands and faces. Only the monks on the bench did not move.

The old man rose on shaking legs, leaning on his cane. Shan pulled his hat low over his brow and darted outside, reaching the man in time to steady him as he tripped on a stone.

The blind man turned his head only slightly, hesitating. “You’re a stranger,” he said in a neutral tone.

“Allow a poor pilgrim to gain favor, Grandfather,” Shan replied, putting his hand lightly on the man’s elbow to guide him.

The man sighed, then nodded. “My niece is in the pastures or she would take me. Just as well when these vultures come to town.”

“
Lha gyal lo,
” was Shan’s reply.

The little temple was lit only by sputtering butter lamps along the altar. Incense curled around a simple bronze Buddha. In a voice as thin as the smoke, a monk below the altar read scripture as Abbot Norbu stood silently beside him. The assembled monks and villagers murmured responses then, when the reading was done, Norbu led them in a long mantra. The words were pronounced softly at first, in the near whispers Shan usually heard in such rituals but then to his surprise, the blind man beside him lifted his bowed head and interrupted, speaking a new mantra, more loudly toward the ceiling. Shan watched in confusion as the voices of the others faded, then joined him. As the volume rose, seeming to take on what seemed almost a defiant tone, a monk rose and pushed a bolt on the door. Norbu cast a nervous glance toward the door, then pushed aside a dark swath of felt hanging below from the altar and reached into the shadows, extracting an ornate silver bell with a dragon elegantly worked around its handle. A shiver of excitement coursed through the congregated monks as Norbu bent again and pulled out another deity which he set beside the Buddha. It was a morbid, frightful image of a bull-headed god holding flayed human skins and skulls. The image unmasked by Norbu was one of the most fierce of the protector demons. Norbu reached behind the altar for a cloth that he draped over the figure. It was the flag of free Tibet.

Shan glanced back with worry at the locked door. Not only would the officials outside be livid if they knew of the ritual in the little chapel, they would violently disrupt it and arrest those leading it.