The Skull Mantra (25 page)

Another meteor streaked by. “Some of the old yaks say that each shooting star is a soul attaining Buddhahood,” Shan observed languidly.

“The old yaks?” Yeshe asked.

Shan didn't realize he had spoken aloud. “The first generation of prisoners. The oldest survivors.” Shan smiled in the darkness. “My first winter at the 404th we had snow removal duty in the high passes. Bitter cold. The winds, they would do strange things with the snow. Thirty-foot drifts in one spot, bare earth in the next. Boulders sculpted with ice and snow to look like huge creatures from your dreams. One day after a new snow we're digging out the road and there's a big boulder where there never was one before. Brought down by an avalanche, someone said.

“We shoveled snow. It blew back. We shoveled again. Later, behind us, one of the guards screams. The boulder's staring at him.” Shan smiled again. He had forgotten how fond he was of the memory. “It was an old yak, letting the snow cover him to avoid the cold of the storm. He just stood there, like he was part of the mountain, watching the insanity of the world around him. On the way back one of the prisoners said it reminded him of the old monks in the 404th. Ageless, indestructible, like a mountain with legs, at peace in the most tormenting environment. The name just stuck.”

Later a strange sound arose, the buzz of a stadium filled with people. On the platform in the center were three austere figures, seated at a table equipped with microphones. Behind them, off the platform, was an old woman with a mop and bucket. Shan jerked his head up. It was a dream. No, he realized with distress, it was a memory. He stared into the stars, but five minutes later was back in the stadium. A young, frightened man was on stage now, his eyes dull with drugs. A shrill, urbane woman behind him was reading a statement for him, an apology to the people.

Shan willed himself awake, shuddering at the recollection of the last murder trial he had attended. He forced himself to count the stars. He pinched himself. But in his fatigue he returned to the stadium. It was hushed now, and the defendant was on his knees before a Bureau officer. At the last minute, as the officer fired a bullet through his skull, the face changed to that of Sungpo. The old woman climbed the stairs and began mopping away the blood and tissue.

Shan groaned and was instantly in heart-pounding wakefulness. He did not drift off again.

Somewhere, much later, Sergeant Feng spoke again. “That soldier, Meng. He was on assignment to guard the cave. But not on that night.”

“You asked?”

“You needed to know, you said. He probably traded duty hours. Happens all the time without the records being changed.”

“Could we see him? Back at the barracks.”

“Don't know,” Feng said uncomfortably. “I'm assigned to the 404th. Those officers at Jade Spring—I don't know. They're tough as tiger's teeth,” he muttered, then leaned forward as though he had to give full attention to the road.

“Sergeant,” Yeshe ventured from the backseat. “Comrade Shan says the warden is deceiving me. That he plans to detain me again, to work on his computers.”

A strained chuckle was Feng's only reply.

“Is it true?”

“Why ask me? The warden and I, we don't live on the same planet, you know what I mean? How would I know?”

“Just then, you laughed like you believed it.”

“What I believe is that Zhong is one prick of a son of a bitch. He's paid by the people to be a son of a bitch. He doesn't talk to sergeants about his plans.”

“But you could find out. Ask the staff. Everyone talks to the
momo gyakpa.”

Feng slowed the truck. “What the hell did you say?” he barked, suddenly surly.

“I'm sorry. Nothing. Just if you could ask. Maybe I could do something for you in exchange.”

“Momo gyakpa?
Fat dumpling?” Bitterness seemed to
overtake his rage. “I heard it before,” he said after a pained silence, much quieter. “Behind my back. Thirty-five years in the People's Liberation Army and that's what I get.
Momo gyakpa.”

“I'm sorry,” Yeshe muttered.

But Feng was no longer listening. He rolled down his window and reached into the bag of dumplings that was to serve as their breakfast and lunch.
“Momo.”
He picked up a dumpling and squeezed it as if it were something he was trying to kill. He hurled it out the window, then another, and another, throwing one with each protracted syllable. “Momo! Fucking! Gyakpa!” he yelled, with a choke of pain at the end. He stared out the window after the last
momo.
“Used to be called the Axe, for the way I could break things in two with my hands. The Axe. Watch out boys, the Axe is coming, they would say. Colonel Tan remembers those days. Run, the Axe is on leave tonight.”

As soon as the light was strong enough to read by, Shan reached into the canvas bag that Madame Ko had left at the barracks. Three files, the files of the cases which had resulted in the executions of three of the Lhadrung Five. Lin Ziyang, Director of Religious Affairs, killed by the cultural hooligan Dilgo Gongsha. Xong De, Director of Mines for the Ministry of Geology in Lhadrung County, killed by the enemy of the people Rabjam Norbu. Jin San, agricultural collective manager, killed by Dza Namkhai, leader of the infamous Lhadrung Five.

He read the records for nearly an hour. At the end of each file, pages had been ripped out. Witness statements.

Blushed with dawn, the peaks seemed to hover, more a part of the sky than the shadowy earth. Are the only religious people on the planet those who live near mountains? Trinle had asked him once. “I don't know,” Shan had replied, “but I know Tibetans would not be Tibetans without their mountains.”

They began descending into the head of a long valley. Below them, down a mile of winding road, a complex of stone buildings surrounded by long empty pastures could be discerned through the dim morning light. Shan tilted his head as he realized what it was, and that although he had
spent three years living with Tibetan monks he had never until this moment seen an active Tibetan monastery. So few were left.

Yet countless monasteries had been constructed in his mind. On the most bitter winter days, when the trucks did not leave the compound and the prisoners huddled back to back under their thin blankets to conserve body heat, with words the old yaks guided the others through the gompas of their youth. As the prisoners shivered, sometimes so violently that teeth were broken, Choje and Trinle or one of the others began the journey, describing how the dawn played on the distant stone walls of the gompa as the traveler approached, or how the sound of a particular bell resonated within the pilgrim long before the structure came into sight. The smell of jasmine on the path, the flight of a snowgrouse, the rustle of the musk deer that roamed unafraid in the gompa's shadow were not overlooked, nor the cheerful call of the watchful
rapjung,
student monk, who first spied the visitor and opened the gates.

With the prisoners' gompas long ago annihilated and few memorialized in photographs, the only traces left were in the memories of a handful of survivors. But by the time the tale was told—and a visit to a single gompa could be days in the telling—the gompa had been rebuilt in the hearts and minds of another generation. Not just the visual images, for the old yaks reveled also in the sounds and smells of their former homes. Not just the physical, for the human rhythm, too, would be re-created, down to the rheumy eyes of the blind lama who rang the bell or how novices, with wads of horsehair, scrubbed the stone floors that had grown too slippery from the butter offerings. There was a huge prayer wheel in a gompa that once stood in the southern mountains whose squeak reminded everyone of a flock of hungry magpies, Shan recalled, and its kitchen mixed the flowers of a certain heather with barley for a fragrant
tsampa.

Sergeant Feng slowed the truck. “Probably got hot tea,” he suggested, nodding toward the buildings. “Maybe we'll get better directions to Saskya. I don't know this road—”

“No.” Yeshe interrupted with unusual bluntness. “Not enough time. Keep going. I know Saskya. Down the road
twenty miles, up against the high cliffs at the end of the valley.”

Feng grunted noncommittally and drove on.

Nearly an hour later Yeshe directed Feng onto a dirt road that led into a forest of rhododendron and cedar. After a few minutes a long mound of stones became visible, running perpendicular to the road and disappearing into the thickets. Shan raised his hand for Feng to stop, then leapt out, ran to the pile of stones and halted. There was something he recognized, though he had never been there before. From somewhere nearby came the tiny ring of a
tsingha,
the small hand cymbal used in Buddhist worship.

He felt something inside, a flutter of excitement. He
had
been there before, or somewhere much like it, in the winter tales of the old yaks. Slowly his knees collapsed and for a moment he knelt, his hands on the stones. Then he began cleaning the detritus from the pile of rocks. He picked up one, then another, and another. They had been squared off by human hands, and each had a Tibetan inscription, either painted or crudely chiseled on its surface. He was in the middle of a
mani
wall, one of the walls of stones inscribed with prayers constructed over the course of centuries by devout visitors and pilgrims. Each stone was carried from far away, one at a time, for the glory of Buddha. A
mani
stone was said to continue the prayer after the pilgrim left. He looked at them, stretching into the forest as far as he could see, the moldering, moss-covered prayers of generations.

Once Trinle had taken a beating for breaking from a work line to grab such a stone, abandoned on the slope above them. “Why risk the batons?” Shan had asked as Trinle rubbed away the moss to release the prayer.

“Because this may be the prayer that changes the world,” Trinle had cheerfully replied.

Shan carefully rubbed away the dirt from the prayers of six stones and laid out three, then stacked two and one on top. The beginning of a new wall.

Ignoring Feng's scowl, he walked along the road in front of the creeping truck. The tinkle of the
tsingha
floated through the air again, and a high wall came into view. The cracks and seams and patchwork paint on the wall told of
ordeal and survival. It had been battered and rebuilt and broken and patched more times than Shan could trace. Half a dozen shades of white and tan had been painted over the uneven surface, which here was stucco, there plaster, and elsewhere exposed rock.

Flanking the wall on either side were ruins, jagged piles of rocks overgrown with vines, shattered and charred timbers covered with lichens and mosses. The wall, he realized, had formed the inner courtyard of what once had been a far bigger gompa. The gate hung open, revealing several novices sweeping the courtyard with brooms of rushes tied to long sticks.

Shan surveyed the scene with unexpected joy. The buildings were familiar to him from the 404th's oral reconstructions, but nothing prepared him for the stark, powerful presence of a working gompa.

In the center of the yard was a huge bronze caldron, so battered and dented the face of Buddha forged on its side had the appearance of a scarred warrior. Two monks were painstakingly polishing the vessel, which was one of the largest incense burners Shan had ever seen. Wisps of smoldering juniper rose from it as they worked.

On either side of the gate, following the wall halfway around the courtyard, were low structures with roofs made of overlapping flat stones, the quarters of the monks. Assembled of salvaged stone and scrap lumber, they looked suspiciously like unlicensed construction. What was it Director Wen had told them? Jao had denied Sungpo's gompa its building permits, cutting it off from official sources of material.

The buildings beyond were just as patchwork but somehow more majestic. On the left, up a small flight of stairs and past a porch of heavy timbers, was the
dukhang,
the hall of assembly where the monks took their lessons. To the right lay a parallel structure in front of which, under the overhanging roof, stood an upright prayer wheel as large as a man. A monk was slowly spinning it, each rotation completing the prayer inscribed on its side. Behind the wheel, past a pair of brightly painted red doors, was the
lhakang,
the hall of the principal deity. On the outer wall above the
hall was a circular mandala painting depicting the sacred path, the Wheel of Dharma, with a deer painted on either side, signifying Buddha's first sermon in India.

Between the two structures was a large chorten shrine, consisting of a plaster dome built over a square base, flattened at the top with a series of slabs of decreasing size. Above the slabs was a barrel-shaped stage capped by a conical steeple. Trinle had once constructed a tiny chorten of wood scraps for Loshar, the new year holiday, and had been able to explain its spiritual symbolism to Shan before it had been seized and stomped to splinters by Lieutenant Chang. There were thirteen levels to a chorten, representing the traditional thirteen stages of advancement to Buddhahood. The top of the chorten was crowned with sun and crescent-moon shapes worked in iron. The sun represented wisdom, the moon compassion. On the round, barrel-shaped level were two huge painted eyes, symbolic of the ever-watchful Buddha.

Shan stepped into the courtyard as the truck rolled to a halt behind him. The novices in the yard stopped and bowed low as they spotted their three visitors. Shan followed the gaze of one of the monks toward a door in the assembly hall. A middle-aged lama appeared.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Shan said quietly as the lama approached. “May I speak to someone about the hermit Sungpo?”

The lama did not seem to consider the question worth answering. “What is your purpose?”

“My purpose is to find the teacher of Sungpo.”

The man's face tightened. “And what is his guru accused of?”