The Skull Mantra (57 page)

Available November 25, 2014

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Copyright © 2014 by Eliot Pattison

The tear on the young nun's cheek dripped onto the rosary in her hand. As she turned her brave, open face toward Shan Tao Yun, a shaft of sunlight burst through the port in the side of the prison wagon where they huddled, illuminating the tear like a diamond. Once, precious stones had been prized in their land for the adornment of altars and reliquaries. As Shan stared at the rosary, he realized that such tears were the new jewels of Tibet.

“Drapchi, Longtou, Chushur, Gutsa,” the old Tibetan at Shan's side recited in a matter-of-fact tone.

Shan recognized the names of the prisons his friend Lokesh recited not because of his years as a government investigator in Beijing but due to his own years as a prisoner in Tibet. They were being transported from Lhadrung County, home of Tibet's most infamous labor camps, toward the ring of prisons around Lhasa that were akin to medieval dungeons.

“We will have a hearing or trial or something, won't we?” Yosen, the young nun, asked, then began patting the back of the second, older woman beside her. Pema, the grey-haired woman in the tattered felt dress of a farmer, had sat with her eyes closed, for the last two hours, frantically working her prayer beads.

“There is supposed to be a chance to be heard,” Shan agreed, putting more hope in his voice than he felt. Yosen was an innocent, unfamiliar with the ruthless ways of Beijing's Public Security Bureau.

“There will be blue papers with charges listed if they are expecting several years' imprisonment,” Lokesh explained in the tone of an expert. “Yellow papers if it's only an administrative detention. Yellow means no more than a year,” he added more brightly, but then cast a worried glance at Shan. The two friends could list a dozen possible charges against themselves, from sheltering political dissidents to destroying public property and concealing the Buddhist artifacts that Beijing insisted belonged to the state. Any one of those charges would send them back into the gulag for years.

“Yellow, then,” Yosen bravely said, squeezing her companion's shoulder. “The gods will bring us yellow, Pema. We didn't do anything. Except speak of a dead friend.”

Shan leaned toward the young woman. Yosen had said the two women were well acquainted, that she had been pulled out of a chapel at her convent after Pema was taken from a pilgrim's path nearby. The Public Security soldiers, the knobs, who arrested the women, had offered no explanation. “A dead friend?”

Yosen nodded and looked up as the older woman bent lower over her beads. “Before you joined us, Pema and I spoke. I asked her if she knew any reason for this—” She gestured around the rust-stained cell on wheels. “Before they took us, they asked if we knew a woman named Sonam Gyari.”

“Did this Sonam commit a crime?” Shan asked.

“Not a crime. A suicide,” Yosen replied.

Lokesh put a reassuring hand on the young nun's shoulder. “They can't imprison you for having a friend who died.”

Yosen shrugged. “She was my closest friend in my convent,” “They came last week to check our records, wanted to know if she had signed her loyalty oath. Had she recently been home with family? Had she been visited by strangers? It was the same knobs who dragged me from my prayers today.” Tears flowed down her cheeks again. “I was supposed to fill the butter lamps on the altar. What if the lamps go dark?”

Lokesh gently pulled her head into his shoulder.

Shan stood and braced himself on the steel wall to look out its small port. Since Shan and Lokesh were intercepted hours earlier at the ditch where they had been working, the wagon had been driving steadily west toward the Tibetan capital, pausing only at security checkpoints and for a brief rest stop at a truck station, where the rear door was cracked open enough for bottles of water and a bag of cold dumplings to be tossed inside.

“Six checkpoints,” Lokesh said as they pulled away from yet another police barrier across the highway. “Last time on this road, it was only three.”

The news seemed to increase Pema's foreboding. She groaned and dropped her head into her hands. The police were getting more nervous about the
purbas,
the Tibetan resistance, and quicker to forcefully respond to any hint of political protest. After two generations of Chinese occupation, Tibetans still refused to be broken.

“They came and demanded oaths of loyalty to Beijing last fall,” the young nun said in a tight voice. “I was away on retreat and sent mine in two weeks late. The party member who manages the convent chastised me, said such delay could be taken as unpatriotic. I missed two lectures on the duties of citizens given by those Religious Affairs officers. I hear there are quotas now for arresting disloyal monks and nuns. If they decide to call me a traitor, I could be put away for ten or fifteen years.” She too was considering her sins against the state. It was futile, Shan was tempted to tell her, for Beijing was constantly defining new sins for people like her. It hated anyone who even hinted that Tibetans were not Chinese, but most of all it despised those who wore the maroon robes, for it was the monks and nuns who kept the people rooted in Tibetan tradition.

“I visited your convent once,” Lokesh suddenly declared to Yosen in a whimsical tone. “It was 1956, and I traveled with the Dalai Lama, who was just a boy then. He was quite taken with the flock of white goats kept by the abbess.”

Both women looked up with round, wondering eyes, and for the next hour, the old Tibetan drew them away from their despair with tales of the joyful oasis the convent had been before the Chinese occupation.

Shan marveled at his friend's comforting words, spoken with no trace of the fear they both felt. They well knew the ways of Public Security, had suffered its wrath frequently, but had always been able to avoid new prison terms. Today their luck had run out, for they were being driven away from Lhadrung County and the protection of its governor, Colonel Tan. By nightfall, Shan would be listening to his charges, then pleading for a chance to send a note to his son, Ko, himself in a Lhadrung prison. Already he was forming the words of his letter in his mind:
I will find you, Ko. No matter where they send me I will find a way to return. Listen to the lamas.
Ko would know he meant listen to the lamas instead of the guards. That was how Shan had survived his own five years in the gulag.

His companions were sleeping when the truck slowed for another checkpoint before entering what appeared to be a tunnel. Suddenly it stopped, reversed, and its engine died. The rear doors were unlocked and thrown open to reveal six knobs on a loading dock, leveling automatic rifles at them. An officer stepped forward and motioned Shan out. He ignored the officer and turned toward his companions, shaking each awake, calming the women as they saw the weapons.

“You will be processed first,” he whispered in warning. “Do not resist, do not argue, but do not admit to anything and do not sign anything.” He did not have the heart to tell them how first their rosaries, then their traditional clothes would be torn from them, how they would be hosed down with frigid water, then stinging disinfectant before being separated and processed into work units. Pema hastily bent over her beads, then Yosen took her hand and led the older woman into the aisle formed by the guards, leading to another prison wagon. Lokesh seemed unaware of the knobs. He was staring in confusion at the place where the women had huddled. Pema hadn't been reciting one last desperate mantra; she had been sketching a pattern in water on the side of the truck.

No religion on earth used more signs and symbols than Tibetan Buddhism, and Shan had learned many glyphs, but not this one. It was an oval with a crescent shape intersecting the upper right edge, bending forward. He stared so intently, struggling to understand the fading sign, that he did not realize two more knobs had entered the truck until they began leading Lokesh away.

Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed the arm of the nearest guard and then, realizing what he had done, reflexively bent to receive the blow that would surely come. The soldier shook Shan off and laughed.

He gazed in despair but also confusion as the knobs escorted Lokesh into the second truck, then he leapt forward and managed to get within several feet of his old friend before the knobs seized him. “Loooo-kesh!” he cried.

His friend gazed back at Shan with impossible serenity.
“Lha gyal lo,”
the old man called back as the guards shoved him inside the truck. It was the mantra of battered Tibetans: May the gods be victorious.

Suddenly Shan was alone with the knobs. They did not present the expected manacles, did not produce the usual batons, only motioned him with bored expressions toward a metal door. They climbed a dank cinder block stairwell, exiting into a brightly lit hallway of offices beside a washroom. The officer opened the door and pointed to a row of pegs on the wall. “Five minutes,” he announced, then stepped back into the hall. They had a different punishment in mind for Shan.

Shan stared at the door as it swung closed, then at the white shirt and grey slacks on the pegs. He knew from agonizing experience that Public Security was at its most treacherous when it did the unexpected. Something very disturbing was happening, something that hinted of a permanent shift in his life, which he desperately did not want. The few hardened criminals who served among the aging political prisoners of his gulag prison had told Shan that there was always a final run point, a place where a prisoner could still flee before the state's iron grip closed around him. Shan could still run, could lose himself in this strange office building. But he would never be able to help Lokesh by resisting or fleeing. He forced himself to step to the sink to wash off the stench of the meat wagon and began unbuttoning his shirt.

A new escort awaited him in the corridor—a short, lean man in his thirties with long, carefully groomed hair—wearing a suit and tie. “My name is Tuan Yangdong. I am here to assist you, Comrade Shan,” he offered in an earnest tone, and gestured down the hall.

Shan responded with only a nod.

“You must be excited to have this opportunity,” Tuan offered as they walked.

“I would be excited to be back in my ditch in Lhadrung,” Shan replied. Tuan looked at him uncertainly, shrugged, and remained silent as he led Shan to a corner conference room. It was midafternoon, and they were high enough above the ground for an unobstructed view of their surroundings. Shan quickly stepped to the row of windows and found himself overlooking a large compound of nearly identical grey buildings. As his escort poured tea from a large thermos, Shan looked back at the door. It had no locks.

“You have me confused with someone else,” Tuan suggested as he extended a steaming cup to Shan.

“You mean a different Public Security Bureau?” Shan asked. “If you want to help, then tell me where my friend is going.”

Tuan shrugged again. “I am just with the Religious Affairs.”

Shan hesitated. The Bureau of Religious Affairs was the agency that strictly, often ruthlessly, regulated the practice of Buddhism in Tibet. “Half those working for Religious Affairs are seconded from Public Security. Does that include you, Comrade Tuan?”

The question caught Tuan off guard. “Not exactly,” he said awkwardly. “Not anymore. The Party says we must consider Public Security like a college,” he offered with surprising candor. “Religious Affairs officers are encouraged to spend two or three years with Public Security to better understand the challenges the motherland faces in Tibet.” A small, tentative smile appeared on his face. “You seem well versed in the ways of the government for one brought in from such a remote county as Lhadrung.”

When Shan gave no reply, Tuan sighed and busied himself straightening a stack of tablets on a side table. Shan turned back to the windows. They were in a town that was dominated by a dozen four-story glass and concrete buildings and surrounded by a high wall of painted cinder blocks. It was one of the self-contained enclaves for government workers that were being erected all over Tibet, cornerstones for Beijing's expanding structure in the region. Inside the walls would be command centers, offices, apartments, and even shops and cafés for the bureaucrats shipped in from the east.

“Welcome to Zhongje,” Tuan said over his shoulder. “A model town, a settlement of the new age designed to meet all the needs of its residents. Just rocks and grazing sheep three years ago, and now look—a showcase for the motherland!” He pointed out the small square planted with spindly trees that was the town park, an electrical substation, a constable post by the gate, a compound of garages with street maintenance equipment, even a town incinerator. “A taste of what waits all loyal Tibetans.”

Shan stepped to the windows facing north, pulled back the drapes that obscured them, and froze. On the adjacent slope, less than a mile away, there was another, much larger walled compound.

Suddenly Shan knew where he was. Sangpu Abbey had once been the home of one of the largest Buddhists colleges in Tibet, where scores of lamas trained thousands of novices for the spiritual life. But in the early years of the Chinese occupation, it was converted into the largest prison in Tibet and renamed Longtou, Chinese for Head of the Dragon. Its mediation chambers had been stripped to bare stone and used for solitary confinement, its chapels transformed into squalid cell blocks. Shan himself had spent several days behind its bars before being assigned to his death camp in Lhadrung County. His gaze fell on the long, low mounds that cascaded down the slope below the prison. A casual observer might dismiss them as old bunkers or terraces, but Shan had been assigned to a work crew clearing a path for a new road being cut through the mounds. When Beijing had begun crushing the Tibetan Buddhist establishment, Sangpu was one of its starting places. Shan had worked with a horse cart, gathering bones from an exposed mound for shipment to a fertilizer factory. The monks of the abbey had been lined up by the open pits and mown down with machine guns. He recalled now the positioning of the mounds and with a shudder, realized that those near the bottom of the slope had been leveled for construction of the Chinese town. Zhongje, it was called, meaning Peace and Justice.