Soul of the Fire (35 page)

Shan's heart sank as he saw that the knobs had noticed her, and were marching hastily toward the American. She bent and threw a stone toward the prison. The knobs quickened their pace. Shan let them pass him, then moved along the row in the same direction. As the knobs reached Hannah, she threw another stone and, to Shan's horror, shouted “Long live the Dalai Lama!” The frustration and hypocrisy of being a Commissioner that were gnawing at her had finally reached their limit. The words were in English, but the knobs seemed to understand. They pulled out their batons and shouted at her. Hannah threw another rock. The rug vendor backed away in fear.

The knobs waved their batons and shouted in Chinese. Shan quickened his pace. Hannah called out her words again, and the batons went closer, warning strokes that sliced the air, inches from her shoulders. Shan broke into a run. “Just a mistake!” he cried out. “She's an American—” Suddenly he tripped and was on the ground. A baton slashed out and Hannah ducked in the wrong direction. The baton glanced off her head.

The knobs froze, horrified, as blood began flowing down the American's temple. Shan knew they would never have intended to actually hit a foreigner. Judson appeared from behind Shan and ran to Hannah's side. One of the knobs helped support her while the other ran ahead to the infirmary.

Neither of the Americans looked at Shan as they passed him. He moved on toward Yamdrok, pausing to look back as he topped the rise in the road. The vendors, shaken by the incident, were hurriedly packing up. Hannah and her frantic escort had disappeared behind the town wall. He replayed the scene in his mind. She knew better than to cause such a disturbance. Judson had worked his way behind Shan. When the knobs were swinging their batons, Shan had fallen on something. Had Judson tripped him to prevent Shan from reaching his companion? It was as if the Americans had planned for Hannah to be struck by the knobs. Something was happening before his eyes that he could not understand. Everyone in the drama before him was desperate and reckless, and his every instinct screamed that tragedy was about to strike again.

He sat against a boulder on the Yamdrok road, looking back at the gate where the Americans had disappeared. He found himself drawing in the loose soil, a block consisting of a line of three short segments, over a line of two segments, then repeating the pattern of three and two. It had been too long since he had consulted the
Tao Te Ching.
Without conscious effort, he had drawn a tetragram. It denoted Verse Seventy-one, one of his father's favorites: “To know that you do not know is best. To not know of knowing is a disease.”

*   *   *

Lokesh was sitting outside by the bright red door of the old farmhouse, reciting a mantra as a goat watched him intently. He greeted Shan with a bright smile and quickly put away his beads to embrace Shan, pulling him tightly into his chest as if they had not seen each other for a long time. “Look!” he exclaimed, and gestured to the goat's head. Shan saw now the red yarn that had been tied around a bundle of long hair on its neck. “Tserung and Dolma ransomed a goat in my honor!”

It was an old custom that, like so many others, had been banned by Beijing. As a way of showing compassion and celebrating an event, Tibetans would tie yarn or ribbon on a domestic animal, buying the animal if it did not belong to them. Once an animal was so marked, it could never be slaughtered.

“It's a fine goat,” Shan offered.

Lokesh laughed. “It's a happy goat!” He gestured at Shan to follow him up the path around the back of the house. They did not stop until they reached the top of the first small knoll.

“I discovered this vantage point last night,” he said, nodding toward the upper slope above Yamdrok. “This is the way it was meant to be seen. The buildings remember.”

Shan turned to see that Longtou was visible, washed by the setting sun. From their perspective, with the sun's low angle, the prison fences and nearly all the guard towers were lost in shadow. Even the dirty smokestacks blended into the darkness. But the tile roofs and whitewashed walls of the tall central buildings of the old abbey glowed.

“If you know how to look, you don't have to see the prison at all,” Lokesh explained. The essential elements of Tibet hadn't disappeared, his old friend was fond of saying, you just had to know how to look for them.

They silently watched the old abbey as it faded into the shadows, then wandered back to the house. The door opened as they approached. “You will stay,” Dolma announced to Shan. “I made noodle soup.”

Through the back window, Shan saw Tserung completing the final evening chores, carrying a little pail of milk from the back shed, pausing to check the prayer flag on the tall
tarchen
pole.

It was a magical evening. There was no talk of the Commission, Pao, dissidents, or Beijing. Over bowls of steaming soup seasoned with coriander, the old Tibetans offered tales of their youth, stories of aged uncles who had known the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and anecdotes of the mischief practiced by novice monks and nuns. Dolma recounted the great horse festivals that lasted for days in which her uncle had often won races and her mother had won archery contests. Tserung told a solemn story of meeting one of the state oracles, Lokesh shared tales of attending daylong folk operas in the summer palace below the Potala.

“These are things you must remember, Shan,” Lokesh said with a smile as he sipped salted tea at the end of the meal. Shan hesitated for a moment over the hint of parting in the words, but decided his friend referred just to Shan being a generation younger, so he nodded good-naturedly. As Dolma brought a bowl of apricots and walnuts, Tserung began to speak about how they used to train for the riderless horse races so popular in his youth.

“There is a little dog,” Shan said during a break in the conversation. “A Tibetan terrier named Tonte who is out of place in Zhongje. It needs a home.” The old Tibetans just smiled patiently at him, as if not grasping his suggestion. Dolma began to speak of the winter their abbess woke them up each night to contemplate a comet, then was interrupted by a sudden knock on the door.

Tserung sprang up. “Pavri!” he exclaimed, “I almost forgot.” He opened the door, and a well-dressed Tibetan woman stepped inside.

It took a moment for Shan to recognize Lam's assistant, who was glancing at her wristwatch. “It's almost—,” Pavri began, then saw Shan. Her surprise turned to fear, and she backed toward the door.

“It's just Shan!” Dolma called out, and rose to comfort the woman. But Pavri would not be persuaded to stay. She lifted a hand in farewell and closed the door behind her.

The three Tibetans stared at Shan. He felt somehow he had disappointed them. Dolma reached into her apron, pulled out an old pocket watch, and frowned as she looked at it.

The battery. Suddenly Shan remembered the battery he had seen on the floor. He glanced about the room, then his gaze settled on the high pole beside the goat shed. “The
tarchen
,” he observed. “Only the
tarchen
is new.”

Dolma sighed but did not look up. Tserung tightly gripped his
gau.
Lokesh grinned.

“I can speak English,” Shan announced.

“Lha gyal lo,”
Lokesh replied, then stood and urged Dolma and Tserung to their feet.

Moments later, they waited by the goat shed as Tserung opened the padlock on its door. Shan stepped to the nearby
tarchen
and grabbed the fluttering flag. The wire was tiny, barely visible in the moonlight. It had been expertly sewn into the hem of the flag, then twisted into the cord that secured it to the pole before joining with the strand of smaller prayer flags that ran to the goat shed.

In the light of a kerosene lantern held by Tserung, Shan could see where the wire entered through the wall and disappeared behind a wooden crate covered with a fleece. Dolma uncovered the crate and lifted it to reveal a large radio receiver. Lokesh gave a boyish laugh. Tserung switched on the device and it hummed to life.

“And now for our personal message board,” came the British-sounding voice from Dharamsala.

Shan did not know what they sought, and would not ask. He translated everything. Name day greetings, news of births, tidings of death, names of monks in India who had passed their advanced exams to join the ranks of
geshe.
He did not know when they started smiling, but at some point, he realized Dolma and Tserung had joy on their faces. As he helped Dolma conceal the radio again, he recalled how they had described the loss of their son. “Your son did not come back from a pilgrimage,” he recalled. “It was a pilgrimage to India.”

Dolma smiled. “Perhaps the greatest pilgrimage of all is to go meet with the Dalai Lama. Our son is in Dharamsala, yes. He works for all Tibetans now.”

Afterwards, Lokesh walked with him to the edge of the village. “I saw a meteor shower last night. A sign of momentous events.”

“The most momentous will be when you and I return to the hills of Lhadrung,” Shan said.

“You understand that above all, Dawa must be saved,” Lokesh replied. “I told you my dream of her. She is a
bodhisattva
, Shan. She may not understand, but I am convinced of it.”

Shan paused and looked at his friend. Never before had he had heard Lokesh speak of another person this way. A
bodhisattva
was an enlightened being who chose to stay among humans to help them rather than moving on to a higher plane of existence.

“She is flesh and blood,” Shan ventured awkwardly, not wanting to argue. “She brings hope to thousands.”

“She must be saved,” Lokesh said again. “Do not interfere with their plans. Do not let the sacrifices be in vain.”

“She must be saved,” Shan echoed, not understanding, and struggling not to read foreboding into the old man's words. They walked on. Shan spoke about the dog. Lokesh said he had been praying for Shan's son, Ko. They stopped when they reached the wind fangs.

“I was scared when those knobs arrested us that day in the ditches,” Lokesh confessed. “But now I see it was my destiny. You can go for years looking for meaning—then it just falls on you like a nut from a tree.” He made a gesture toward the shimmering stars. “They look different now, like they are waiting,” he said, then turned and embraced Shan. “You have always understood, my friend. You have always understood the importance of realizing our destinies.” He handed Shan an envelope, then turned back to the village.

Shan watched Lokesh with a confused smile on his face. He was not sure he could make sense of their conversation, but it was not the first time that had happened, and it was blessing enough just to be with the old man. He leaned into the wind and traversed the fangs.

Back in his room, he discovered that someone had arranged for his bed to be removed. No new bed replaced it, but there was a pile of blankets by the door. Shan arranged them on the floor and set his little Buddha on the footstool, lit a cone of incense beside it, and tried to pray. After several minutes, he rose and found a box of sugar in the little kitchen cabinet. He poured the sugar onto the counter, spread it out, and drew another tetragram, a repeating pattern of a solid line over a line broken into two segments. It signified Verse Eleven of the
Tao Te Ching.
He whispered the words to himself:

Clay is shaped to form a vessel

What is not there makes the vessel useful.

Doors and windows are cut to form a room.

What is not there makes the room useful.

Take advantage of what is there by making use of what is not.

The one certainty he had was that he was missing something, the piece of the puzzle that bound all the others together. He had thought Xie's murder was the beginning, then the murder of the woman in Macau. But his instinct now told him he was wrong. It had started when the Americans met Dawa in Colorado.

He settled back before the little Buddha and stared at it. He had learned in Tibet not to trust the investigator inside him. Facts were too often misleading. The truth lay elsewhere, in the clouded countenance of Tuan, the sidelong glances between Dawa and Judson, in Pao's lust for manipulation and the staging of a purification ritual for Hannah Oglesby.

He had no idea of the time when he finally stood, but was yawning and folding a blanket for a pillow when he remembered the envelope, which he had dropped on the table. On long winter nights, he had taught Lokesh the verses of the
Tao Te Ching,
and his old friend had written the tetragram for his own favorite verse, Number Twenty-nine.
The world is a mysterious instrument,
it said,
not made to be handled. Those who act on it spoil it. Those who seize it, lose it.

With a yawn, he opened the envelope, smiling to find a handwritten note from Lokesh.
Attaining final fulfillment,
the words said,
is not a mere blowing out of the candle. / It is the last flame that marks the arrival of dawn.
He hesitated a moment, recognizing the parchment from Shetok, then felt something else in the envelope and upended it on his palm.

The world went dark. A terrible racking sob shook Shan. He stopped breathing. In his palm was one of the severed halves of Lokesh's identity card. The words were a death poem. The old Tibetan was going to immolate himself.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He waited for the Americans to emerge from town on their dawn hike and followed. Their pace was slow, as if Hannah, wearing a hood against the chill air, had not yet recovered from her altitude sickness. At times, she stopped and leaned on Judson. Shan stayed in the shadows, pausing at large outcroppings as the Americans kept moving. Birds flew low in the heather. They did not raise their binoculars. When they finally entered the little herder's hut a mile from Zhongje, he was close behind.