The Skull Mantra (4 page)

Sparrows flitted among the heather. There were no birds at the 404th. Not all the prisoners were fastidious in respecting life. They claimed every crumb, every seed, nearly every insect. The year before there had been a fight over a partridge that was blown into the compound. The bird had narrowly escaped, leaving two men with a handful of feathers each. They had eaten the feathers.

The four-story building that housed the government of Lhadrung County had a crumbling synthetic marble facade and filthy windows in corroded frames that rattled in the wind. Feng pushed Shan up the stairs to the top floor, where a small gray-haired woman led them to a waiting room with one large window and a door at each end. She scrutinized Shan with a twist of her head, like a curious bird, then barked at Feng, who shrank, then sullenly removed the manacles from Shan's wrists and retreated into the hallway.

“A few minutes,” she announced, nodding at the far door. “I could bring you tea.”

Shan looked at her dumbfounded, knowing he should tell her of her mistake. He had not had tea, real green tea, for three years. His mouth opened but no sound came out. The woman smiled and disappeared behind the near door.

Suddenly he was alone. The unexpected solitude, however brief, overwhelmed him. The imprisoned thief suddenly left alone in a treasure vault. For solitude had been his real crime during his years in Beijing, the one for which no one had ever thought to prosecute him. Fifteen years of postings away from his wife, his private apartment in the married quarters, his long solitary walks through the parks, the meditation cells at his hidden temple, even his irregular work hours had given him a hoard of privacy unknown to a billion of his countrymen. He had never understood his addiction until that wealth had been wrenched away by the Public
Security Bureau three years before. It hadn't been the loss of freedom that hurt most, but the loss of privacy.

Once in a
tamzing
session at the 404th he had confessed his addiction. If he had not rejected the socialist bond, they said, there would have been someone there to stop him. It wasn't friends that mattered. A good socialist had few friends, but many watchers. After the session he had stayed behind in the hut, missing a meal just to be alone. Discovering him there, Warden Zhong had dispatched him to the stable, where they broke something small in his foot, then forced him back to work before it could heal.

He examined the room. A huge plant extending to the ceiling occupied one corner. It was dead. There was a small table, polished brightly, with a lace doily on top. The doily caught him by surprise. He stood before it with a sudden aching in his heart, then pulled himself away to the window.

The top floor gave a view over most of the northern quarter of the valley, bound on the east by the Dragon Claws, the two huge symmetrical mountains from which ridges splayed out to the east, north, and south. The dragon had perched there and taken phantom form, people said, its feet turned to stone as a reminder that it still watched over the valley. What was it someone had shouted when the American's body was found? The dragon had eaten.

He pieced together the geography until at last, across an expanse of several miles of windblown gravel and stunted vegetation, he discerned the low roofs of Jade Spring Camp, the county's primary military installation. Just above it, and below the northernmost Claw, was the low hill that separated Jade Spring from the wire-enclosed compound of the 404th.

Almost without thinking Shan traced the roads, his work of the past three years. Tibet had two kinds of roads. The iron roads always came first. The 404th had laid the bed for the wide strip of macadam that ran from Lhasa, beyond the western hills, into Jade Spring Camp. Iron roads were not railways, of which Tibet had none. They were for tanks and trucks and fieldguns, the iron of the People's Liberation Army.

The thin line of brown that Shan traced from an intersection north of town toward the Claws was not such a road. It
was far worse. The road the 404th was building now was for colonists who would settle in the high valleys beyond the mountains. The ultimate weapon wielded by Beijing had always been population. As in the western province of Xinjiang, the home of millions of Moslems belonging to central Asian cultures, Beijing was turning the native population of Tibet into a minority in their own lands. Half of Tibet had been annexed to neighboring Chinese provinces. Population centers in the rest of Tibet had been flooded with immigrants. Endless truck convoys over thirty years had turned Lhasa into a Han Chinese city. The roads built for such convoys were called
avichi
trails at the 404th, for the eighth level of hell, the hell reserved for those who would destroy Buddhism.

A buzzer sounded. Shan turned to find the birdlike woman standing with a cup of tea. She extended the cup, then scurried through the far door, disappearing into a darkened room.

He gulped down half the cup, ignoring the pain as it scalded his throat. The woman would realize her mistake and take it back. He wanted to remember the sensation, to relive the taste in his bunk that night. Even as he did so he felt demeaned, and angry at himself. It was a prisoner's game that Choje warned against, stealing bits of the world to worship back in the hut.

The woman reappeared and gestured for him to enter.

A man in a spotless uniform sat behind an unusually long, ornate desk lit by a single gooseneck lamp. No, it was not a desk, Shan realized, but an altar that had been converted to government use.

The man silently studied Shan while lighting an expensive American cigarette.
Loto gai.
Camels.

Shan saw the familiar hardness. Colonel Tan's face looked like it had been chiseled out of cold flint. If they were to shake hands, Shan thought, Tan's fingers would probably slice through his knuckles.

Tan exhaled the smoke through his nose and looked at the teacup in Shan's hands, then to the gray-haired woman. She turned to open the curtains.

Shan did not need the sunlight to know what was on the
walls. He had been in scores of such offices all over China. There would be a photograph of the rehabilitated Mao, pictures of military life, photos of a favorite command, a certificate of appointment, and at least one Party slogan.

“Sit,” the colonel ordered, gesturing to a metal chair in front of the desk.

Shan did not sit. He examined the walls. Mao was there, not the rehabilitated one but a photo from the sixties, one that showed the prominent mole on his chin. The certificate was there, and a photograph of grinning army officers. Above them was a picture of a nuclear missile draped with the Chinese flag. For a moment Shan did not see a slogan, then he saw a faded poster behind Tan. “Truth,” it said, “Is What the People Need.”

Tan opened a thin, soiled folder and fixed Shan with an icy stare.

“In Lhadrung County the state has entrusted the reeducation of nine hundred and eighteen prisoners to me.” He spoke with the smooth, confident voice of one accustomed to always knowing more than his listeners. “Five
lao gai
hard labor brigades and two agricultural camps.”

There was something Shan had not seen at first, fine wrinkles below the close-cropped graying hair, a trace of weariness around the mouth. “Nine hundred and seventeen have files. We can tell where each was born, their class background, where each was first informed against, every word uttered against the state. But for the other one there is only a short memorandum from Beijing. Only a single page for you, prisoner Shan.” Tan folded his palms over the folder. “Here by special invitation of a member of the Politburo. Minister of the Economy Qin. Old Qin of the Eighth Route Army. Sole survivor of Mao's appointees. Sentence indefinite. Criminal conspiracy. Nothing more. Conspiracy.” He pulled on the cigarette, studying Shan. “What was it?”

Shan held his hands together and stared at the floor. There were things far worse than the stable. Zhong didn't need Tan's permission to send him to the stable. There were prisons where inmates never left their cells except in death. And for those whose ideas were truly infectious, there were secret
medical research institutes run by Public Security Bureau doctors.

“Conspiracy to assassinate? Conspiracy to embezzle state funds? To bed the Minister's wife? Steal his cabbages? Why does Qin not trust us with that information?”

“If this is some sort of
tamzing,”
Shan said impassively, “there should be witnesses. There are rules.”

Tan's head did not move, but his eyes shot up, transfixing Shan. “The conduct of struggle sessions is not one of my responsibilities,” he said acidly, and considered Shan in silence for a moment. “The day you arrived, Zhong sent your folder to me. I think it scared him. He watches you.”

Tan gestured to a second folder, an inch thick. “Started his own file. Sends me reports on you. I didn't ask, he just started sending them. Results of
tamzing
sessions. Reports of work output. Why bother? I asked him. You're a phantom. You belong to Qin.”

Shan gazed at the two folders, one with a single yellowed sheet, the other crammed with angry notes from an embittered jailkeeper. His life before. His life after.

Tan drank deeply from his teacup. “But then you asked to celebrate the chairman's birthday.” He opened the second folder and read the top page. “Most creative.” He leaned back and watched the smoke wisping toward the ceiling. “Did you know that twenty-four hours after your banner we had handbills circulating in the marketplace? In another day an anonymous petition appeared on my desk, with copies being passed around the streets. We had no choice. You gave us no choice.”

Shan sighed and looked up. The mystery was over. Tan had decided he had not been punished sufficiently for his role in Lokesh's release. “He had been imprisoned for thirty-five years.” Shan's voice was little more than a whisper. “On holidays,” he said, not knowing why he felt the need to explain, “his wife would come and sit outside.” He decided to address Mao. “Not allowed closer than fifty feet,” he said to the photograph. “Too far to talk, so they waved to each other. For hours they just waved.”

A narrow smile, as thin as a blade, appeared on Tan's face. “You have balls, Comrade Prisoner Shan.” The colonel
was mocking him. A prisoner did not deserve so hallowed a title as Comrade. “It was very clever. A letter would have been a disciplinary offense. If you had tried to shout it out you would have been beaten into silence. Your own petition would have been burned.”

He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “Still, you made Warden Zhong look like a fool. He will always hate you for it. He asked for your transfer out of the brigade. Said you were a saboteur of socialist relations. Couldn't guarantee your safety. The guards were furious. An accident could happen to Minister Qin's special guest. I said no. No transfer. No accident.”

Shan looked into Tan's eyes for the first time. Lhadrung was a gulag county, and in the gulag, prison wardens always had their way.

“It was his embarrassment, not mine. Releasing the old man was the right thing. Gave him a double ration book.” Smoke drifted out of the colonel's mouth. He shrugged as he caught Shan's stare. “To correct the oversight.”

Tan closed the folder. “Still, I grew curious about our mysterious guest. So political. So invisible. I wondered, should I worry about the next bomb you might throw our way?” He took another drag on his cigarette. “I made my own inquiries in Beijing. No more information, they said at first. Qin was not available. In the hospital. No more data on Qin's prisoner available.”

Shan stiffened and looked back at the wall. The chairman seemed to be staring back now.

“But it was a quiet week. My curiosity was aroused. I persisted. I discovered that the memo in the file was prepared by the headquarters of the Public Security Bureau. Not the office in Xinjiang that arrested you. Not in Lhasa where your sentence was entered. Over nine hundred prisoners, only one has a file prepared by the Bureau's Beijing office. I think we never appreciated just how special you are.”

Shan stared into Tan's eyes again. “There's an American saying,” he said slowly. “Everyone is famous for fifteen minutes.”

Tan froze. He cocked his head and continued to stare at
Shan, as if he wasn't sure he had heard right. The knife-edge smile slowly reappeared.

There was a rustle of small feet behind Shan.

“Madame Ko,” Tan said, the cold smile still on his face. “Our guest needs more tea.”

The colonel was too old to be on the promotion lists, Shan decided. Even at his exalted level, a post in Tibet was a post in exile.

“I found more about this mysterious Comrade Shan,” Tan continued, shifting into the third person. “He was a Model Worker in the Ministry of Economy. Commendations from the chairman for special contributions to the advancement of justice. He was offered Party membership, an extraordinary reward for someone halfway through his career. Then he did something even more extraordinary. He declined. A very complex man.”

Shan sat. “We live in a complex world.” He saw that his hands, unconsciously, had made a
mudra.
Diamond of the mind.

“Especially when you consider that his wife is a highly regarded Party member, a senior official in Chengdu. Former wife, I should say.”

Shan looked up in alarm.

“You didn't know?” Tan asked with a satisfied smile. “Divorced you two years ago. Annulled, actually. Never lived together, she said.”

“We”—Shan's mouth was suddenly bone-dry—“we have a son.”

Tan shrugged. “Like you said. It's a complex world.”

Shan closed his eyes to fight the sudden pain in his gut. They had finished the final chapter in their rewriting of his life. They had managed to take away his son. It wasn't that they were close. Shan and his son had spent maybe forty days together in the fifteen years since the boy was born. But one of the prisoner's games he played was fantasizing about the relationship he might have someday with the boy, about somehow creating the sort of bond Shan had shared with his own father. He would lie awake, wondering where the boy might be, or what he would say when he met his father again. The imagined relationship had been one of
Shan's last slender reeds of hope. He pressed his palms against his temples and leaned over in his chair.