Authors: Eliot Pattison
The stream was two hundred yards away, and they had only two small leather buckets and the cooking pots from the house to carry water. They ran back and forth from the stream for a quarter hour, then Lhandro raised his palm and lowered his empty bucket to the ground. They could do nothing but watch as the conflagration, having already destroyed the lhakang, consumed the assembly hall and spread to the small deity chapel beside it.
“Like a giant samkang,” Nyma said with a whimper. Incredibly, Gang, through years of effort, had constructed the buildings of cedar and juniper, the kind of fragrant wood burned in samkangs to attract deities.
Suddenly the nun cried out and ran to the other side of the lhakang, Shan at her heels. Winslow was bent over, gasping, hands on his knees, beside a large block of wood. Tenzin sat on the ground nearby, his face smudged with soot. As the flames flared up in a gust of wind Shan saw the block more clearly. The two men had saved the half-completed carving of the protector deity. Beyond them in the shadows another figure sat, Gang’s young daughter staring with vacant eyes at an object between her legs. It was the prayer wheel. Her hands lay open on either side of the wheel. The skin was burned away from the palms, exposing raw flesh where she had grasped the searing metal. Nyma gasped and bent over the girl, calling for the last pail of water to wash the terrible wounds.
Shan found Lokesh with his back to the fire, deep pain in his eyes, watching the sparks as they flew into the night. As Shan stepped to the old Tibetan’s side, he was unable to find words. It could not have been an accident. There had been no campfire near the cluster of restored buildings, and Gang would never have burned his little samkang, consuming scraps of his precious wood, at night, unattended.
“Someone came from outside,” Shan said in a low voice. “That dobdob tried to burn the plain. It must have been—” something cracked into the side of his head and Shan found himself on his knees, blinking, unable to focus his eyes. Something sharp hit his shoulder, then Lokesh cried out and threw himself over Shan.
“Oppressor!” a voice shouted angrily, and a stone bounced off Lokesh’s leg. “Tyrant! A Chinese comes and ruin follows!”
There was a struggle behind them. Shan twisted about on his knees to see Lhandro and Nyma pulling Gang backwards, dragging him away from Shan. His injured hand reached out toward Shan like a claw, as the other was pushed downward by his wife, a stone dropping from it. As the others pulled her husband away Gang’s wife hesitantly stepped toward Shan, her cheeks stained with tears and soot.
“You must understand,” she said in a rush of breath, like a sob. “All these years. Since our first child was born, all that time.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “In the winter waiting for snow so he could drag the wood down from the mountains. In the summer covered with sawdust. Working in the moonlight even, working on festival days. Never even taking time to play with his children.” A wall crashed down, sending splinters of smoldering timbers flying in an explosion of sparks. A piece of charred, smoking wood landed at her feet, and she knelt by it, studying it as if she needed to understand where it had belonged in the lhakang.
“Sometimes he had to make his own tools,” she said, in a remote tone now, as she lifted the wood and struck it on the ground to shake off the embers. After a moment she stood and carried the fragment to a row of stones, then carefully laid it on the ground. She found another, nearly two feet long, struck away the embers, and silently laid it alongside the first. Tenzin appeared, carrying another fragment to lay beside those collected by the woman. A pile of salvaged wood. The first step in building again.
They spent the rest of the night and much of the next morning combing through the ruins of Gang’s buildings, collecting the remnants of wood, gathering up nails and straps of metal from the ashes, many twisted with heat.
As they worked Gang lay on a pallet that had been brought for him, sometimes gazing morosely at the smoldering ruins, muttering something that might have been a prayer, other times glaring toward Shan, throwing pebbles and curses at him whenever he approached. Again, the only person able to restrain him seemed to be his son, who sat holding his father’s good hand, gripping it tight when emotion flared inside Gang.
“It’s so remote,” Winslow said as he gathered nails in one of the cooking pots. “So empty here.” A moment later he looked up with a puzzled expression. “It could only have been that man who attacked Padme. He burnt that little meadow.”
“Lightning,” Lhandro reminded them. “Lightning could have struck the rooftop. It is a way the deities have of speaking,” he added, looking back to Gang, as if suggesting that the deities may have perceived that the shrines had been reconstructed perhaps as much out of hate as faith.
They left for Norbu gompa, Padme’s home, late in the morning as Gang and his daughter were led to the stream to bathe their scorched hands. The caretaker stared with glazed eyes as the sheep began filing away from the bank of the stream. He hadn’t invited the caravaners, hadn’t even welcomed them, and now they left with ten years of his life’s work destroyed.
“We will pray for you,” Nyma said to Gang’s wife as she watched Gang. Then she followed Shan onto the trail.
After four miles they reached the junction with the trail to the north, the trail the caravan would take over Yapchi Mountain to Yapchi Valley. It was another ten miles southeast to Norbu, and they had agreed that the sheep would continue with the other Yapchi villagers on the north trail as Lhandro, Shan, Lokesh, Tenzin, and Nyma carried the monk to Norbu on the blanket litter. They should expect to stay at Norbu, Padme insisted, at least long enough to receive the thanks and blessings of his gompa.
“I’m going up,” Winslow had said as the two groups began moving along their separate paths. Shan studied the American, puzzled. Winslow was leading one of Lhandro’s horses. Then he saw Dremu waiting on the slope above. The American meant he and Dremu were going higher in the mountains to look for the missing woman. The Golok wheeled his horse back and forth, staring at Shan with worry in his eyes. Dremu seemed troubled by the splitting of the party. As the last of the sheep turned onto the northern trail he trotted to Shan’s side. “He can walk,” the Golok said loudly, within earshot of Padme. “Don’t go. Let that one walk home.”
Nyma shot Dremu an irritated glare. “We know how to take care of injured holy men,” she declared curtly. The monk moaned and held his head, giving no sign of having heard.
Dremu returned her stare. “Ask him to tell you how monks mingle with the sky deities,” the Golok barked, then cantered away.
Shan studied the caravan as the dogs pushed the sheep up the trail. Dremu’s strange connection with the chenyi stone seemed to have made him resentful of anything, anyone, that caused a delay or detour in its return. But the Golok would soon see that the red bag was staying with the caravan. Shan and the others would be gone just a few hours. After that it would be only another two days to Yapchi.
Shan’s worry soon faded, replaced by an unexpected sense of anticipation as they crossed the ridge that walled the plain on the south side, then descended through the low hills that led to the broad rolling plain below. He had been to very few gompas, at least gompas that practiced in the open, legally, with a full complement of teachers and student monks, and he missed the serene voices of lamas. Looking at the faces of his Tibetan companions, he realized that Padme’s promise of blessings from the Norbu holy men somehow felt important to the Tibetans as well.
It was midafternoon when they crested the last of the long, low ridges and looked down on a complex of buildings surrounded by a ring of poplar trees in spring bud. Most of the structures appeared to be of stone and pressed earth construction, with neat grey tile roofs, the walls painted a pale cream color, all within a square outer wall of stone painted white, perhaps two hundred yards on each side. Three large buildings lay in the center of the neatly groomed complex, their walls sloping slightly inward at the top, all painted in the same cream color to a point just past the center of the second floor windows, then maroon above, the color of a monk’s robe. Lhandro and Nyma, at the front of the litter, gave simultaneous exclamations of joy, and encouraged the weakened Padme to gaze upon his gompa.
“I never thought to see so many buildings!” Lhandro exclaimed. He offered a look of encouragement to Nyma. “The world is changing, you see.”
But just as they were about to lift the litter again Nyma pulled a length of yak hair rope from the sack on her shoulder and tied it around her waist, giving her robe the appearance of a dress. Shan stared in puzzlement a moment, until Lhandro looked from Nyma to the gompa and nodded soberly. He took off his vest and handed it to her as she unpinned her long braids. Even though the world was changing, even though it was a gompa, it still meant Nyma was going down into the world, or at least its nearest outpost, where even a casual observer might quickly surmise she was a nun and inquire about her registration.
After half a mile, only a few hundred yards from the gompa, Lhandro looked back with frustration at Lokesh and Shan realized his friend, at the rear of the litter, had slowed, impeding their progress.
“The gompa,” the Yapchi headman reminded Lokesh energetically. Lokesh offered a weak smile in reply, then quickened his pace. The old Tibetan’s companions had become familiar with his habit of gazing off at some distraction in the landscape. But Shan studied his friend. There was something else about Lokesh his new companions didn’t understand, something Shan himself had taken years to recognize. Just as Lokesh occasionally had outbreaks of deep emotion, he also had outbreaks of what, for lack of a better word, Shan could only call intuition. He could be like a horse, innately sensing something approaching on the far side of a hill, or the rock pika jumping out of its hole and screeching for two minutes before an avalanche tumbled down from the mountain above.
Once, three months before, Lokesh had stopped Shan as they began to cross an ice-covered river after they had crossed three such rivers that very day. The old Tibetan had not been able to answer Shan’s confused questions, had only stood and made a hoarse croaking noise, even when he looked into Shan’s eyes. They had stood there for ten minutes before Shan’s spine began to tingle because he realized that the river was croaking, too, echoing Lokesh with a deeper but somehow similar sound. Then abruptly the river ice had split apart and a long wide gap appeared in the center, revealing black, fast-moving frigid water underneath.
Was that what Lokesh was feeling now? Was that what Dremu, the feral Golok, had sensed at the trail turnoff when he had seemed to be asking Shan and the others to leave Padme behind? Shan kept studying his friend as Padme began to stir in the litter. Lokesh was not staring at the gompa now, but beyond it to a thin grey ribbon that led toward the horizon. Toward the northern highway, perhaps thirty miles away. A road meant patrols.
They were only four hundred yards from the gompa when Padme weakly raised his arm for them to stop. “I will not go in like this,” he said in a strained, brave voice, and rose from the litter. He zipped up the yellow vest and began to walk, feebly at first, with visible effort, then with longer, more confident strides. A monk on a ladder, adding whitewash to the outer wall, stopped brushing and called out excitedly. Moments later several monks ran out of the gompa to greet Padme.
“Rinpoche! We were going to send out searchers!” the first to reach him called, then cried out in dismay as he saw the injuries on Padme’s face and arms.
Men in robes quickly surrounded Padme, supporting him at each shoulder as they escorted him past a small collection of rundown habitations and through the two tall square pillars on either side of the gompa gate. Shan and his friends stared toward the monastery uncertainly, then with a blur of movement a small brown dog was at Tenzin’s feet, barking in a shrill, high-pitched frenzy, tugging his pant leg, tearing it. Tenzin bent to put a hand on the dog’s head, and the dog bit it. Suddenly a stone flew through the air, hitting the dog on its side. The animal yelped and scurried away around the corner of the gompa wall.
Lhandro stepped to Tenzin, who held up a bleeding finger, and produced a water bottle to wash the wound. Shan surveyed the small buildings by the gate. In front of one crumbling packed-earth house a man with shaggy white hair and leathery skin sat under a crude awning, bent over a foot-powered sewing machine, working on what appeared to be a monastic robe. Another man, nearly as old, his head heavily bandaged, leaned against a rusty metal barrel, asleep. An old woman in a heavily patched chuba, her eyes glazed with cataracts, sat in the doorway of another house, little more than a hut, spinning a small prayer wheel. No one looked up. No one showed a victorious smile after witnessing Padme’s return, or even after driving away Tenzin’s attacker.
There was a single new construction outside the gate, a long narrow open-faced shelter of cinderblocks with a tin roof and a dirt floor. It was a familiar fixture of Shan’s prior incarnation; they were called newspaper huts in Beijing or, by some, Party shithouses. Inside, on the back wall, a long glass-enclosed case displayed a recent copy of the official newspaper published in Lhasa, in Chinese. Shan looked back at the Tibetans scattered around the buildings. He doubted any of them spoke, let alone read, Chinese. Hesitantly stepping into the hut, he gazed down the row of newspaper pages, at the end of which was a board on which local announcements had been pinned. He quickly scanned the pages. A speech on foreign relations from the Chairman in Beijing was reproduced in its entirety, taking up three pages. A company from Shanghai, whose name he recognized as an entity owned by the People’s Liberation Army, was building a hotel for tourists at the base of the Potola. Production of timber in eastern Tibet continued to surpass all records. The beloved abbot of Sangchi gompa, one of the largest in Tibet, previously reported to be defecting to India, was now known to have been kidnapped by members of the Dalai Cult—one of Beijing’s favorite labels for those who resisted the party line in Tibet. A new hydroelectric facility had been dedicated southeast of Lhasa. A senior leader of the Dalai Cult, the notorious Tiger, was now believed to have killed Chao Yu, the heroic Deputy Director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs in Amdo town. Shan read the story twice. There was no reported evidence, just a statement from Public Security about the Tiger’s record of violence and treason. The Tiger, the reviled reactionary puppet of the Dalai Cult, an accompanying article reported, would soon be cornered by Public Security forces and would meet the people’s swift justice. A Tibetan school in Qinghai had sent the Chairman a map of China constructed entirely of rice. A Chinese school girl had saved a drowning lamb in Shigatse. There was a photograph of the lamb.