Authors: Eliot Pattison
The stern white-shirted Han men who had patrolled the festival camp had done so with disinterested, almost careless expressions. The first day a junior official, not Tuan, had strutted among the Tibetans with a suspicious air, as if he were passing judgment on the assembly. When he had shouted orders for several of the dropka to open their gaus for him the dropka had hesitated. But then the purbas had begun playing East Is Red, one of Beijing’s favorite anthems, on a portable tape machine and several children appeared waving minature flags of the People’s Republic, supplied by the purbas themselves. The howler offered an icy smile of approval, then waved the dropka away before withdrawing with a smug expression. His casual air had worried Shan. Important prisoners should have made the guards more wary.
But still, a single sentry in a white shirt had been posted at the gates at all times since Shan had begun watching from the rocks above two days before. He took encouragement from the presence of the guard, as he did from the news that the dining hall was closed, but still there was no proof that Lokesh and Tenzin were inside the gompa walls. Somo now ran to the nearest guard, spoke in a low tone as she handed him Lin’s letter, then darted away as though there was a crisis in the mountains. Everything went as scripted. She would not linger, for fear of too many questions. She would speak in a low voice, in hope of being mistaken for a man, and she would not look at the guard’s face, to make it less likely she could be identified later. The guard stared in confusion after the running soldier a moment, then ran inside the administration building with the letter. Shan leaned forward with his binoculars. No one immediately appeared at the door but there was a movement at the window of the second floor office Shan had seen on his first visit. Less than a minute later, with a flush of excitement he watched five figures emerge and stride hurriedly to the gate: Director Tuan and Chairman Khodrak with the original guard and two more of Tuan’s soldiers. As they reached the gate the guard pointed at Somo’s receding figure, now far up the ridge. If they followed, the purbas were ready. By the time the guards arrived at the top of the ridge they would see four figures in army tunics, prompted by hidden purbas with signal flags, moving over the crest of the next ridge, hopelessly out of reach.
Tuan looked as though he was about to order some of his men after Somo, but he looked out over the Tibetan encampment and seemed to reconsider. Instead he spoke to one of the guards and the man shot away, toward the structure behind the administrative building.
Nyma shot Shan a grin. “Lha gyal lo,” she whispered. Perhaps it was as much evidence as they could hope for.
Yet still the Tibetans in the encampment expressed reluctance to go inside the gompa. If they were to proceed with their plan they needed help from the rongpa and dropka, help in understanding who might be inside, help in avoiding too much of the howlers’ scrutiny. But it was a place of monks, a sacred place, despite the Chinese flags that flew between the buildings, and Lhandro cast discouraging looks toward Shan as the leaders of the gathered clans met with the purbas.
A new set of visitors began moving around the camp, two photographers with several monks, led by Padme, who pressed bits of hard candy into the hands of all the children. Shan followed at a distance, watching as the group paused repeatedly to take photographs: Monks with smiling children on their laps. Monks helping to decorate the yaks. Padme gave new nylon jackets to several adolescents and distributed bottles of orange drink, directing the photographers to shoot pictures of all the joyful faces against the brilliant blue sky, then again with the gompa in the background. Padme found tools and had the monks pose with hammers, pretending to repair the rundown buildings outside the gate.
As Padme led his party back into the gompa grounds, Shan lingered in the shadows beside the purba truck, a new hat pulled low over his eyes. He became aware of an old man staring at the truck, a white-haired Tibetan with a leathery face that bore the scars and wrinkles of a long hard life. The man sat forty feet away, his back against a small mound of felt blankets left beside a dropka yurt. Shan realized that not only had the man been there for hours, he had seen him on another day, operating a sewing machine at the gompa gate the first time Shan had visited Norbu. He saw the man’s fingers working, two fingers moving in and out by his knee. It could have been a nervous gesture. It could have been a request for someone to approach, by a man who did not know how otherwise to ask. Shan pulled his hat tight and with small, tentative steps ventured near the old man.
The Tibetan nodded as Shan reached him, and Shan hesitantly sat beside him. There were spies everywhere, Somo had warned. Sometimes monks were found to be working for Public Security. Even older Tibetans were coerced into becoming informants by promises of leniency for loved ones in prison. “They say you came from a Chinese bayal to help us,” the man said in a strong but hoarse voice.
A Chinese hidden land. The man meant that people didn’t come to help from the normal Chinese world. Perhaps it was true, Shan thought. A bayal known as the gulag. “I would like to find a way to help,” Shan confirmed.
The man looked about and produced a folded piece of paper from inside his dirt-encrusted chuba. “I used to work at First House,” he announced with a proud smile that showed half his teeth to be missing. “Not a monk, but as a carpenter. Once there was beautiful wood growing on those slopes. Sometimes people still come and ask me to make things. Simple things. A table, a chair, a stool. But paper to draw patterns and designs on is always scarce. A man from the kitchens wanted an altar built for his mother, and asked me to draw it for him, so he could buy the wood. He brought this to draw on, when that Padme left it on a table one night.”
It was an oversized sheet, a map, Shan saw, a map drawn by an expert hand, or perhaps traced from a printed map. The old man extended a gnarled finger at several notations. “Second House,” he explained, pointing to Norbu, at the bottom of the sheet. “First House and Metoktang,” he said. He was indicating the Plain of Flowers and Rapjung. The place names were shown, only in Chinese.
“I read and write Chinese,” the man said. “Those men at the gompa like to laugh at me, and I just play along. Fools are always to be pitied. Even that man in the kitchens doesn’t know I read Chinese. None of them know I studied at the gompa school, with teachers who said we must learn how to live with the Chinese.” The man gave a wheezing laugh and gestured back at the map. “If you wish to understand Second House, this is all you need,” he announced.
Shan gazed at him uncertainly, then glanced at the newspaper shed, remembering the defiant words secretly written on the board, and went back to making sense of the other marks on the paper. There was a legend that said Sterilized, depicted with an X drawn inside a circle. There was such an X on the far northwest corner of the Plain of Flowers, marked with a date, ten days earlier. There were at least fifteen more such marks on the adjoining lands, with dates, all within the past two months. On Rapjung gompa itself there was such a mark, Sterilized, with a date nine days before. He recalled Larkin’s report of a monk and a doctor in the mountains, carrying kerosene. Then suddenly he understood, and felt strangely weak.
“May the gods be victorious,” the old carpenter said softly as Shan rose to take the map to the meeting by the truck, where he quickly explained it to the purbas, farmers, and herders at the same time.
“But there is nothing out there,” a middle-aged dropka pointed out, confusion on his leathery face. “Nothing but wilderness. Nothing that could be used against us.”
“The howlers would call them olds,” Shan said, and he saw several of the Tibetans cringe. “Old herbal beds once used by the lamas. Holy sites used by the lamas from Rapjung. That is what Padme is destroying. We took him to Rapjung and he destroyed the buildings there.” He paused as Lhandro explained the terrible night at Rapjung when the reconstruction had been reduced to ashes. They had been wrong about the dobdob, Shan knew now. The dobdob must have stopped Padme, beaten him because he had found the monk trying to burn the herbs. He remembered Padme’s reaction when he had seen the reconstructed shrines at the old gompa. He had read reports, Padme had said. He meant Public Security and howler reports. It meant the dobdob was trying to stop the howlers, trying to stop the destruction of the herbs. The dobdob, protector of the virtuous, must have been Jokar’s companion, the one they had seen in the meadow with Jokar, the one who was now missing.
Gyalo stepped forward to explain what he had seen inside Norbu. Finally Nyma stood up and quietly asked how many knew Drakte. Nearly every hand went up. By the time she had quietly finished explaining that Drakte had been killed trying to help, there were no more arguments from the farmers and herders. They rose with grim determination and broke into groups as the purbas began explaining their plan.
The special medical team was still at Norbu, its technicians looking fatigued as they wandered out among the Tibetans. It meant that the manhunt for the medicine lama had not stopped, and was staying in the area. Why, Shan wondered? What evidence about Jokar kept them at the gompa? Surely if they had known his destination they would have not wasted so many weeks tracking him in the mountains from India.
Less than an hour after the letter was delivered, Tibetans began forming a line at the gate, some of them holding their abdomens, two purbas wearing arms in slings. The guard would not let them inside. They waited patiently, nearly an hour, before one of the men in the light blue uniforms noticed them and instructed the sentry to allow the sick Tibetans to enter, not noticing the single Han among them, wearing a dirty bandage on his hand and his new broad-brimmed hat pulled low around his forehead.
When he arrived at the rear of the compound, Shan was relieved to find none of the discipline he had seen on his first visit. A rope had been strung along on portable wooden posts outside the makeshift clinic, to shepherd the sick into a line. The medical team worked through the first few patients quickly, with an absent air, giving all of them some form of medication. Those released from the doctors milled about the rear of the compound, speaking with those in line, marveling over the large prayer wheel, even admiring the huge pile of yak dung, apparently untouched since Gyalo had left.
Shan and Nyma drifted away from the line and wandered toward the stable where they had been trapped on their first visit. They stopped at the stable and confirming that no one was watching, stepped into the adjacent structure as Shan slipped off his bandage. The low, decrepit wooden building was old, perhaps older than the stable. Its meditation cells, three on either side, and two at the back, were musty, the air stale. Shan remembered Gyalo saying that the gompa had only a third the number of monks it had been built for.
Of all the human-built places Shan had experienced in the extraordinary lands of Tibet none moved him more than the simple wooden cells he sometimes, rarely, discovered in the country’s remote regions, in the few structures remaining from earlier centuries. Here men and women had sat through the centuries, engaged in exactly the same pursuit, with the same feelings, the same yearning for awareness that Shan and his Tibetan friends felt. He had awkwardly described to Gendun one of his first encounters with such a cell as visiting a time machine, for somehow he had sensed the presence of monks who had sat there, three or four hundred years before. But no, Gendun had said, not a time machine, for that implied too much difference between us and them, as if the centuries changed those who sought awareness. It was a bridge, he said, a way of stepping beyond time, eliminating time, reaching for the same plane of awareness that enlightened beings inhabited, without regard to time. He paused, remembering Gendun’s words, and for an instant wanted nothing more than to sit and meditate in one of the cells.
“Jokar Rinpoche said it was from the time of the Sixth, when they came for him,” Shan said, stepping past Nyma to the rear cells. He was still struggling to see through Jokar’s words, still trying to separate those words meant for this world and those meant for another.
“Lhabzang Khan,” Nyma said in a distracted tone as she stepped into one of the rear cells. She raised a finger and tentatively touched the old cedar, as if it might crumble. “Lhabzang Khan from Mongolia invaded Tibet and kidnapped the Sixth Dalai Lama. His army came through Amdo on the northern road.”
It had been three hundred years earlier, Shan remembered, when the young Sixth had been kidnapped by the Mongolians, with the notion of presenting him as a gift to the Manchu emperor in Beijing. But the Mongols and the Chinese had been cheated when the Sixth had died en route to China.
“Places like Norbu, near the northern road, would have been looted,” Shan said, and stepped into the second cell. He began pushing the rear wall along its edges. Nothing moved. He pressed his finger along the length of each seam in the planks. Nothing. No gap in the finely crafted construction. He stepped out of the cell and saw Nyma was doing the same in the first cell. “Someone could come,” she said, nervously glancing over her shoulder.
He stepped into the cell with the nun. “Jokar,” she sighed, “could just have been speaking about something he saw when meditating, a vision.”
Shan nodded in disappointment. There was a little ledge made of two narrow planks built into the side of the cell, where a monk might place a butter lamp and incense burner. He ran his hands along the planks and under them. There was no lever, no switch hidden underneath, no place to hide anything. Finally he ran a finger along the top of the planks, lightly at first, then harder. As his hand approached the rear corner, the end of the back plank dropped half an inch, and the rear wall swung open.
It was a narrow space, no more than three feet wide. As they stepped inside Nyma lit a match. They had no candle, no butter lamp, no electric light. But they also had no time to linger. Nyma extended the match in one direction, then the other. The musty closet ran for twenty feet. At one end was a bench, on which cushions were stacked, at the other shelves.