Authors: Eliot Pattison
Winslow grinned at the two unconscious men and then at Shan and Gyalo. “Like I’ve been saying all along, what this country needs is a few good cowboys.” He was wearing a chuba, with a military wool cap covering his light hair. His cheeks were darkened with dirt. In the early hours of the morning the American and Nyma had climbed a tree at the rear wall and dropped inside.
They quickly bound the two men together with medical tape, taped their mouths, and carried them into the shadows at the rear of the clinic.
The rear of the compound was empty. They quickly carried Lokesh past the stable and into the meditation cells, where hands reached out to help him as the secret door swung open. Shan carried the empty stretcher back to the medical station, leaning it against the wall with three others. Moments later he returned to the hidden closet, now lit by Winslow’s electric lamp. Lokesh lay asleep on the cushions Shan had seen the day before. Winslow stood with Nyma at the opposite end of the chamber, studying the shelves. In the light of the electric lamp their contents were clearly visible: Peche, over a dozen Tibetan books, were stacked there, each wrapped in a dusty red cloth. Shan fought a momentary urge to examine the old books, took one more look at Lokesh and stepped out into the cell, closing the secret door behind him.
He lingered outside the cells a moment, wondering if he should risk appearing back at the assembly, where his arrival might be conspicuous now that the Chairman was well into his speech. He wandered around the rear of the gompa and worked his way toward the rear of the office building. On the front side of the building the Chairman was still speaking, now about the importance of electronics production, citing factory names and specific worker heroes. Shan had personally attended a dozen May Day speeches in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. They could last an hour or more. He stepped inside. In the entry room a small table was littered with food dishes. A Party newspaper had been dropped in haste on the table. A blue suit jacket hung on a peg in the wall. Slipping it on, he quietly stepped out into the corridor and up the stairs. He passed the office with the loudspeaker in the window and continued to the meeting room, pausing a moment as he saw a sixth robe that now hung on the pegs for dead monks, an addition to the row since his first visit. Gyalo, it said in large script, a deserter from Buddha.
He searched the empty conference room methodically. The closet in the corner was filled with boxes of the plastic dorjes and other small trinkets, as well as a stack of familiar little books with red vinyl covers. Scriptures from Beijing. A black leather satchel sat on a chair beside more maps like the one the carpenter had given him, marking the progress of Norbu’s campaign against the old order. The top map was in a plastic jacket, clipped to a large envelope bearing the address of Religious Affairs headquarters in Lhasa.
Beside the maps were sheets from old peche. From the words Shan could make out and the diagrams of plants they appeared to be directions for finding and using herbs. Six feet down the long table was another grouping of old writings, broader than peche leaves, arrayed around a tablet with the familiar caption decrying feudalism. The tablet had perhaps thirty names, in Chinese. Names were being transcribed from the old papers, which were records from an old gompa. They were names of lamas and monks, he suspected. The howlers were recording the names of the former inhabitants of Rapjung and Norbu to see if any of their families survived. Shan had been conscripted for similar tasks during his imprisonment. Refining the socialist context, a political officer had called it, when he had been forced to help cross-reference telephone directories with lists of old gompa members. The surviving families might not be punished, might never know they had been identified. But the party cherished such data, for future reference, for possible leverage when more information or intimidation might be needed. A white sheet was clipped to one peche page, bearing a Chinese translation. Jokar Rinpoche, a summary said, senior instructor at Rapjung and now a senior member of the Dalai Cult. At the top of the sheet someone had written an excited note.
Guru Dorje,
it said,
this is the one,
with the words underlined twice:
he came from Rapjung.
It was why the medical teams were staying. They had discovered Jokar’s destination.
A chalkboard had been propped on an easel at the end of the table, on which a list of numbered rules had been inscribed, with a number of cross-outs and corrections, as if they were still being drafted and refined: No contributions shall be made by the people directly to monks or nuns. The managing committee of the gompa must receive and record all contributions. All those who contribute more than two percent of income shall pay a tax equal to one hundred percent of the contribution. Labor contributed to reconstruction of any religious shrine, cairn, or gompa must be reported, valued, and taxed accordingly. Religious Affairs will strictly enforce the requirement that all religious artifacts are the property of the people’s government. Those with personal shrines must pay a rental to the government. Gompas will be encouraged to start economic enterprises and will eventually be required to report a profit to maintain their licenses.
It had the sound of a bizarre manifesto, the platform for a campaign that would truly mean the end of religious activity in Tibet.
Shan looked back uneasily at the note that bore Jokar’s name. Guru Dorje, it said at the top. It was like an irreverent nickname. Guru was Sanskrit, another word for lama, and the dorje, the thunderbolt scepter, was one of the most important implements of Buddhist ritual.
Below the chalkboard at the end of the table lay a stack of reports with glossy covers. Each was nearly an inch thick and had a plastic spine along its left side. Prosperity Blooms in Norbu District, the title read. Shan stared grimly at the reports, then leafed through the top copy. Computer graphics had been heavily utilized, with graphs and tables and pie charts, most comparing current economic activity in the district with historic performance. The district was a powerhouse of development, the report explained. Barley production had soared four hundred percent. Sheep herds had increased threefold, goats almost fivefold. The severe health problems that had once debilitated the population were gone. Friction between the district’s diverse populations had been eradicated.
Beside the reports was a facsimile of a brief letter from Religious Affairs headquarters, congratulating Khodrak and Tuan on their success in the Serenity Campaign and noting that their proposal had met with enthusiastic support in Lhasa and Beijing. Lhasa looked forward to announcing the new institute for Tibetan children that would be awarded to Norbu. An institute. It was why Tuan had referred to needing more teachers, why Drakte had been so upset about Khodrak’s falsification of the data. Sign the ledger, Drakte had told the woman at the Lamtso Gar, or all your children will grow up to hate you.
Shan lingered at the door a moment, looking at the blackboard, then stepped back into the still-empty corridor. Drawing a deep breath, he walked into the office, staying in the shadows, away from the window. Over a hundred people sat outside, watching the speaker in the office window. No one, as he had hoped, had dared stay inside to work while homage was being paid to the Chairman. He quickly surveyed the room. Two photographs were taped over a filing cabinet. One was of Tenzin, taken in the conference room where Khodrak had confronted him less than two weeks earlier. Beside it was a photograph from a newspaper, showing Tenzin in a robe, his head shaven, greeting several important-looking Han, over a caption that said the Tibetan people welcome the Vice Premier. Over the door, invisible to those who looked in from the corridor, was a small banner, in Chinese only. Strike Hard. It was the name for one of Beijing’s most aggressive campaigns against the Tibetans in recent years, in which the howlers and knobs had temporarily joined forces in another effort to pry Tibet’s collective fingers from its rosary.
He glanced at the clock. By now Somo and another of the purbas were dropping down the back wall, wearing uniforms of the 54th Mountain Combat Brigade. Suddenly there was applause, both over the radio and from outside. Shan darted out of the room to a large office occupying the entire end of the floor opposite the conference room, with windows overlooking the courtyard, just in time to see Tenzin being led around the corner by one of the knob guards. The radio was switched off. Standing in the shadows, he watched as Khodrak stood and introduced the important visitors from Lhasa, then stated that it was his great honor to make an announcement that would reverberate throughout the world. The famous abbot of Sangchi, lost for so many weeks, had come to Khodrak, and the abbot had chosen to honor Norbu by announcing to the world, on May Day, on the steps of their own gompa, that he had not been fleeing or kidnapped but had simply been on retreat to better understand the socialist imperative. The assembly stared in disbelief before breaking into enthusiastic applause. The Religious Affairs officials conferred excitedly, then stood and vigorously shook first Khodrak’s, then Tenzin’s hand. The abbot of Sangchi, Shan saw, wore one of the Norbu gilt-edge robes.
Shan watched, his heart racing, as Tenzin spoke, offering his gratitude to everyone at Norbu gompa. “If I have confused the people of Tibet,” he said, “I apologize. Perhaps I myself was confused for a long time. But now, here at Norbu gompa, because of Chairman Khodrak, I have come to clearly understand my path,” he said, and looked out toward the northern landscape. “I am a hermit who wanders the countryside,” Tenzin said in a melodious tone, “a beggar who travels alone. I left behind the land of my birth and gave up my fertile fields.”
Khodrak and Tuan glanced nervously at each other. Tenzin was reciting one of Milarepa’s songs, one of the ancient songs Lokesh sometimes sang. The Closing Song some called it, because it was written when the famous teacher lay dying. A dropka ventured forward to the podium and handed Tenzin a khata. Khodrak smiled icily then inched forward as another, then a third Tibetan offered Tenzin prayer scarves. Khodrak looked uneasily at the Bureau officials, rose and stood at Tenzin’s side. One of the monks stepped forward with a camera and snapped a photograph.
Shan’s gaze drifted toward the wall by the window. Pinned there was another of the maps depicting the sterilization campaign. He turned to study the room. Along the wall by the door was a row of filing cabinets, above which hung a flag of the People’s Republic. Past the cabinets, in the corner, sat a cardboard box, its contents covered with dust. They were photographs in uniform black frames, most of which were images taken in banquet halls or on the steps of important government buildings. Tuan was in all the photos. Tuan in a knob uniform, Tuan in a business suit, Tuan with Khodrak, raising glasses with army officers, even Tuan on the Great Wall. He looked up. In any other office these would be trophies, to be prominently displayed. But Tuan had no personal photographs on his walls, no mementos of his career.
A different kind of photograph was pinned to the wall behind a large desk, a glossy picture ripped out of a magazine, of a small cottage on a tree-lined lake with a rowboat pulled up in front of it. Under the picture was a small table with a single drawer. Shan slowly opened it to find a large knife, a butcher’s knife, and over a dozen packs of cigarettes. He looked back up at the cottage by the lake. It had the air of someone’s retirement dream. He looked at the knife. It could have been used to kill Drakte.
A facsimile page had been left on the otherwise empty blotter of the desk. Shan scanned it without touching the paper. It was confirming that transportation had been arranged for the Norbu delegation to attend the upcoming celebration for the Yapchi Valley oil project, in two days time. Lhasa had decided that the event provided the perfect opportunity for the anxiously awaited award ceremony for the Serenity Campaign. Norbu’s new institute would be announced at that time. A photographer would accompany them, and a security contingent.
A small black wire ran from the wall into one of the desk drawers. Shan opened the drawer to reveal a white dial telephone, with an index card of numbers taped to its side. He lifted the receiver to confirm it was live, warily set it down. He opened the drawer below to find medicine bottles, over two dozen bottles of pills. Standing, he paced the room, then found himself back at the desk, lifting the phone. He quickly dialed the first number, listed as the Religious Affairs district headquarters in Amdo town.
A woman answered on the fifth ring. “Wei,” she said. It was the universal syllable used over telephones in China, not a greeting, just an anonymous acknowledgment.
Shan froze, about to hang up, then looked at the five digits on the face of the phone and recited them to the woman.
“I am sorry,” she said. “Everyone else is at the labor day celebration. If I can help the Director’s office—”
“It is a day for honoring heroes,” Shan said.
“Yes,” the woman replied uncertainly.
“The trip to Yapchi,” Shan said. “The arrangements for travel. The Director wanted me to confirm that we received them, to make sure no last minute changes had been made.”
“No changes.”
Shan turned and looked at the picture of the cottage again. “The Director reminded us that heroes walk among us. It is why he wants the full names and addresses for the five, so they may be properly recognized.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Director has a private meeting with those from Lhasa. He has decided that on a day such as this all of the people’s heroes must be honored. Those who work in secret too often get overlooked.”
“But you must have—”
“Everyone else is at the labor day celebration,” he reminded her. “If you are worried about security I will give you the identification numbers so you can cross-check them,” he said, pulling out the paper Somo had given him, and carefully reading out the numbers for the five unexplained entries.
“Very well,” the woman sighed. “I will fax the list immediately.”