The Skull Mantra (59 page)

Judson cast a disappointed glance at Shan and turned to Choi. “I am confused once again, Madam Chairman. Was it psychosis or was it drugs?”

Choi forced a patient smile, as if accustomed to inane questions from the American.

Several minutes of discussion followed, in which Zhu and Choi spoke in a familiar code. Zhu reported that the woman had come from a reactionary family with known links to several old
gompas,
meaning the nun's family had provided nuns and monks for generations. Choi read a report that the dead nun had been entered into an assimilation program while still a young student, meaning she was given a new Chinese name and sent to a Chinese boarding school. But she had run away, back to her family. Vogel handed the folder to Choi, who held it in midair as if considering what to do with it. Shan now saw that there were two stacks of files in front of her. “A close question. Mental illness, I think,” she declared, and dropped it onto the larger stack.

As she did so, Shan leaned back in his chair with his folder, taking it out of Sung's view. Under the pretense of examining the case report, he opened the folded sheet with the photographs again. He noticed now there was writing on the paper behind the photos, what appeared to be two separate verses:
You won't see the jewel of my faith,
stated the first,
Just the gems that are my gleaming bones.

The second simply said:

It took this long for me to learn

How frightened they are of flames.

“File Fifty-eight,” Vogel continued. Shan closed the folder and straightened in his chair. “Kyal Gyari, originally from a herding family. Investigators confirmed that he had no monastic registration and no current residency permit. Shreds of blue and red cloth were found.” He handed the file to Madam Choi, who held the file over the smaller stack.

“Nomads are known to move around,” Hannah Oglesby suggested. “They might not understand the need to register a tent.”

“The facts speak for themselves,” Choi intoned in the special sugary voice she seemed to reserve for the Americans. “He gave up his citizenship rights. Therefore, he was an outside agitator working terrorism against the state.”

“Do you have evidence that he left the country?” Judson asked.

“His citizenship lapsed. Therefore, he was an outsider.” Choi dropped the file onto the smaller pile.

The pattern became clear as two more cases were reviewed. One of a schoolteacher who had refused to punish children for speaking Tibetan in her classroom, the other, an old farmer who siphoned fuel from his tractor to cause a disturbance in his town square after his son had been imprisoned. Shan gazed at Choi in confusion as questions leapt to his tongue. Why would the farmer need fuel for a disturbance? Why worry about shreds of cloth? What did the schoolteacher have in common with a psychotic nun? What did these incidents have to do with the acts of self-aggression mentioned in the press release? He opened his mouth to speak when a scream from outside interrupted.

Shan shot up and darted to the open window. The scream sounded again from somewhere on the far side of a large truck that had stopped on the road outside the town wall, blocking their view; then came shouts from onlookers running past the truck. Pedestrians on the road stopped to turn toward the prison. Major Sung spat a curse and tried to close the drapes over the window, but Judson stepped close, pressing his hand against the glass to stop him. A siren began to whine and constables ran out of the post by the gate. Government workers streamed out of the buildings, pointing up the slope.

Then the truck pulled away and Shan had his answers. A monk in a maroon robe sat on one of the burial mounds, an arm stretched beseechingly toward the sky. He was engulfed in flame.

The characters and places in these pages are entirely fictional. The fifty-year struggle of the Tibetan people to maintain their faith and integrity in the face of extreme adversity is not.

For readers interested in learning more about that struggle, a number of books on the modern Tibetan experience have been written, including several excellent firsthand accounts by or about Tibetan survivors. These include
A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands,
by David Patt; John Avedon's
In Exile from the Land of Snows; Ama Adhe: The Voice That Remembers,
by Adhe Tapont-sang and Joy Blakeslee; and
The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk,
by Palden Gyatso with Tsering Shakya.

 

 

 

 

 

THE SKULL MANTRA

 

Copyright © 1999 by Eliot Pattison.

 

Excerpt from
Water Touching Stone
copyright © 2000 by Eliot Pattison.

 

Maps copyright © 1999 by Miguel Roces.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

 

ISBN: 0-312-97834-0

EAN: 80312-97834-1

 

St. Martin's Press hardcover edition / September 1999

St. Martin's Paperbacks edition / April 2001

 

St. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

 

eISBN 9781429979276