Soul of the Fire (3 page)

Vogel lowered himself into one of the two chairs at the head of the table, smiled at Miss Lin as she set tea in front of him. As Sung lit another cigarette, the American woman shot him a sour expression, then rose to open a window. On her wrist Shan saw a string of
dzi
beads, a Tibetan talisman against demons.

“We call to order this eighteenth official session of the Peace Commission,” Vogel intoned in English with a flat voice. Miss Zhu, sitting between Choi and Vogel, expertly translated into Chinese.

The German nodded to Shan. “We wish to acknowledge our new member, Mr. Shan Tao Yun of Lhadrung. We welcome you to the historic and hopeful work of the People's Commission.”

Shan nodded back. “I would be honored to help the people find hope.”

The two Americans grinned. Madam Choi's eyes went round. Kolsang, the Tibetan, looked up in surprise. Tuan, sitting at the wall, seemed to cringe. Shan had spoken in Tibetan. Major Sung rose and advanced toward Shan as Shan repeated the words in English.

“Excellent! A true believer, then!” Vogel hastily declared.

As the German leafed through his file as if looking for the script Shan spoke from, the major lowered himself into the chair beside Shan. Sung laid a cell phone on the table and pushed it toward Shan. On its screen was a photograph of Lokesh. It had been no more than ninety minutes since Shan last saw his friend, but the knobs had been busy. The old Tibetan sat in a cell of naked stone and wore the uniform of a hard labor prisoner. One eye was swollen shut. A finger was bandaged and splinted.

Shan's world went dark. Despair welled up again. He had seen Lokesh suffer many times, each incident more wrenching than the last. This time, Shan now knew, Lokesh was suffering because of him. He had been beaten and imprisoned, his finger broken, merely to establish Sung's hold over Shan.

He gripped his cup of tea in both hands, fighting the impulse to turn and look at the prison on the hill behind them.

“File Fifty-seven. Dorje Chugta,” Vogel read, stumbling over the Tibetan name as Lin distributed a single-page report to each Commissioner. “Age twenty-three. A novice nun at Wokar convent.”

Madam Choi took up the story. “A tragic case. She had confessed to harboring unpatriotic thoughts. A specialist from the Bureau of Religious Affairs was urgently dispatched to intervene. But unfortunately, arrangements could not be made in time. Her psychosis overwhelmed her. Expert forensic investigators also confirmed the presence of hallucinogenic drugs in her blood.”

Shan studied the other Commissioners. All but the Americans were busy writing notes. Judson and Oglesby simply sat with their hands folded in front of them. Did they understand how preposterous it was to suggest that a nun had imbibed hallucinogens?

As if reading Shan's thoughts, Judson cleared his throat. “Once again, the lab report seems to have been misplaced. Surely we are entitled to see the direct facts, not some summarized conclusions.” As the American spoke, he turned toward Shan. Shan sensed the invitation on his face and edged forward in his chair. Then Sung pushed the phone image closer, and Shan sagged, looking down at the table.

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 it 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 flames.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Shan was so fatigued, he did not realize he had a visitor until the man kicked his slop bucket. He groggily sat up on the cold metal slab hanging on chains that served as his bed. The dark figure loomed over him, silhouetted by the corridor light, then suddenly the naked bulb overhead switched on.

“We haven't become sufficiently acquainted, Comrade Shan,” Tuan said. “Things moved too quickly yesterday. Your truck was late. Major Sung insisted we had to meet to make up the disrupted schedule. If you understood our expectations more fully this—” He searched for a word. “—this embarassment could have been avoided. A bad start. We will make a new one today.”

Shan swung his legs over the side of the cot and shook the fog from his head. Before drifting off to sleep he had lain awake for hours, replaying the prior day's events in his mind, haunted by the image of the burning monk. Even when he finally shut his eyes, the strange verses had echoed in his head. “I couldn't understand why the Commission was reviewing those files. I thought it must just be another campaign to explain crime in political terms. But it's about the suicides,” he said.
It took me this long to learn / How frightened they are of flames,
one of the verses had said. “It's about the self-immolations.” Shan wasn't shamed or frightened. He was angry. “Tibetans are dying, and you want to make a political charade of it.”

Tuan seemed confused. “The Deputy Secretary gave a speech at the Commission's opening banquet. We need to ensure that our policies are rooted in international consensus.”

Shan followed Tuan's gaze to the little shelf by the holding cell's door that held a bottle of water and a paper cup turned upside down. He was wondering if Shan had taken the capsules they left in the cup. “Deputy Secretary?” Shan asked. He had broken the capsules apart and buried them in the bucket.

“Pao Xilang. The General Secretary is old and sickly, a figurehead. Pao runs the Party in Tibet. Which means he runs Tibet. Surely you know about Pao.”

“Emperor Pao,” Shan said. His voice was hollow. The young star of the Party was known not just for his imperious manner but also for the merciless way he dealt with Tibetans. “And what about the immolation we witnessed yesterday? Has the Deputy Secretary decided? An industrial accident? More drugs? A faulty cigarette lighter might work, except monks don't smoke. Anything but a protest.”

Shan was ready for a slap, a punch to the belly, a threat of torture. Instead Tuan shrugged and gestured toward the door. “Put on your shoes,” he suggested, then grimaced when he noticed Shan's tattered work boots. “You came in those?”

“Ditch inspectors work in mud. I was on my official duties when I was summoned.”

“The motherland makes unexpected demands of us,” Tuan said in a strangely apologetic tone. He waited for Shan to tie his boots, then knelt with the air of a servant and straightened his pants legs so they hid the boots before leading him out of the cell. The corridor had no windows, and as they walked along the dimly lit passage Shan realized he had no idea of the hour. The building seemed empty. The freshly mopped floor stank of cleanser. A Tibetan janitor with a jaw of grey stubble paused in his work to stare out at them from a darkened doorway.

“It snowed last night,” Tuan said conversationally. “Just flurries. People think Tibet should have lots of snow, but it's too dry. Only at higher elevations.”

Shan eyed Tuan suspiciously. He seemed too easy to please Shan. There were operatives all over China trained to do nothing but probe and test those deemed politically unreliable. “I worked on prison crews that cleared the high roads in the winter. There could be twenty feet in some passes, with drifts along cliffs so wide you couldn't tell where the mountain ended. The guards would send old Tibetans out to test them. Half of them didn't come back. The snow would give way and they would just disappear. No one even bothered to look for their bodies.”

His tale silenced Tuan, who just stared at the floor until they reached a set of double doors near the end of the corridor. Shan hesitated, looking back to see the old janitor in the hall now, leaning on his mop, still staring at them.

They entered a cavernous chamber with dining tables at one end and sofas arranged in squares at the other. Through swinging doors beyond the tables came the clatter of a busy kitchen. The far wall was lined with windows. Fingers of grey and purple reached across the night sky, with a blush of pink on the horizon. Shan resisted the urge to dart to the windows to gaze on the darker shadow on the hillside that was Longtou Prison. Lokesh was there, beaten and in pain, lying in a cold stonewalled cell.

Instead, Shan studied the hall with the eye of a prisoner as he followed Tuan. The windows slid sideways on metal tracks. In seconds, he could open one and drop to the ground one story below. The hallway behind them was dark. He could spin about, race out the door, and lose Tuan in the labyrinth of corridors. Cooks and food workers began milling through the kitchen doors. The workers and their carts would provide cover if he darted through the kitchens.

He glanced back at Tuan, who was pulling out a chair for him as a woman in an apron arrived with a tray holding two bowls of porridge, two cups, and a pot of tea. “The Commission is a wonderful opportunity for a man like you,” Tuan declared as he poured the tea.

Shan silently sipped at his steaming cup, confused by the nervousness in the young officer's voice. “I want to know exactly where my friend is. I want to see him.”

Tuan's brow furrowed. “I have no idea what you are speaking of.”

“He's in the prison. Longtou.”

“You misunderstand certain things.”

“I misunderstand everything,” Shan shot back. “Have him released.”

“I told you, I am not Public Security. I am just BRA.”

Shan lowered his cup. “Tibetans hate the Bureau of Religious Affairs more than they hate Public Security. Public Security just wants to take away their freedom. You want to take away their gods.”

Tuan gave an exaggerated grimace. “I've heard it all before. We mock the traditional deities. We disrupt the old ways that define the common people. What we want is to pull them out of the muck of disease and poverty they've lived in for centuries. Orphans who need to embrace their motherland,” he added, repeating a slogan from a new Religious Affairs poster campaign.

Shan studied Tuan more carefully, noticing now his long features and aquiline nose. “One of your parents was Tibetan,” he ventured.

Tuan offered a reluctant nod. “My mother. Sure, I'm a goat,” he quipped, using one of the less pejorative labels applied by Chinese to those of mixed Tibetan and Chinese blood.

“How does your job make her feel?”

Tuan seemed to find the question humorous. “She tried to make me Tibetan when I was young. Forced me to eat roasted barley and buttered tea and sit before images of long-dead men,” he replied with a grin. “But she died a long time ago.”