Soul of the Fire (9 page)

Shan looked at his folder, which held a photograph of smoldering logs. The charred remains by the ashes could have been taken at first glance to be just another burnt log. On the ground beside the dead man, not mentioned in the report, was a scrap of yellow, blue, and red cloth. It was, Shan suspected, what was left of a flag of Free Tibet.

“Forest guard?” Judson asked. He lifted the photo for all to see. “Look at the slopes behind him. There's not a tree left standing.”

Shan examined the photo again, which showed several mountains in the background. The near slopes were scarred with logging roads and covered with stumps. The mountains had been denuded. In another year they would be eroded wastelands.

“The angle of the camera is deceiving,” Choi inserted. She saw Judson's frown and added, “I have heard rumors of foreigners buying black market logs.”

Shan said nothing, but found himself absently sketching on his notepad. He had drawn the oval and crescent that Pema, the Tibetan farmer, drew on the floor of their prisoner wagon.

“Another poor Tibetan who desperately needed social services,” Vogel observed as Miss Lin refilled their teacups. “Change is inevitable in every society. In my own country, many factory workers have had to adapt to shifts in industries. They learn to seek help from their government. The Commission needs to recommend that social welfare and counseling services be mobilized.”

Choi solemnly nodded. Miss Zhu diligently recorded the suggestion.

“Who absolved them?” Shan wondered. He did not realize he had spoken the words out loud until he saw all the faces trained on him.

“Absolved?” asked Madam Choi.

Kolsang stiffly kept his gaze on the file in front of him as Shan spoke. “In the Tibetan world, it is a grave sin to commit suicide, certain to result in reincarnation as a lower life-form. So many of those appearing in our files were monks and nuns. Surely they would have sought some spiritual guidance.”

Choi looked to Kolsang, who seemed strangely melancholy as he nodded. Her brow furrowed and she studied Shan with new interest. She seemed about to speak, but instead summoned Tuan and whispered in his ear, sending him hurrying out of the room.

Shan shuddered at the way Choi turned back toward him, an odd satisfaction on her countenance.

“File Seventy-four,” Miss Zhu announced in a loud voice, and opened a new folder. “The son of a farmer who stole a vehicle and drained the gas he used for his suicide. His immolation on the highway to Chengdu stopped traffic for hours. He obviously was distraught after realizing he would be arrested for his theft. He knew the people's government deals harshly with thieves.”

Shan was following the other Commissioners toward lunch when a uniformed knob grabbed his elbow. He let himself be led down a side corridor into the rooms that served as the Commission's administrative offices. The knob gestured him into a small conference room decorated with posters of joyous factory workers. On one side cabinet, more than a dozen thick files were laid out, on another, samples of paper and parchment were arranged in a line. Major Sung, Tuan, and Choi sat at the table, staring expectantly at him, joined by a woman with a thin, severe face.

“Director Wu of Religious Affairs serves on a special task force,” Choi began with a nod toward the brooding woman. “She has come in from Lhasa. We want to further understand your excellent point about absolutions, Comrade Shan.”

“Some sins can be absolved,” Shan explained in a slow, wary voice, “forgiven by acts of great compassion and spirituality.”

Director Wu cleard her throat. “I've seen pictures of Western monks kissing the rings worn by princes of their church. Is that what you mean?”

“No.”

“Rich exploiters in the West will pay money to build church buildings,” Director Wu suggested.

“Maybe you need to recognize sin to understand,” Shan stated in a level voice. Director Wu looked at him uncertainly. Major Sung rolled his eyes. Tuan, seeming to enjoy himself, scribbled hastily on his notepad. “I knew an old prisoner who suffered great pain from broken bones that were not set properly,” Shan continued. “One day, he began rising early to clear all the insects from the path that led from the barracks to where the work parties boarded prison trucks. He stopped taking lunch so he could rescue beetles from where we broke rocks for a road along a cliff. He began whispering with a lama for an hour every night. One day, he bowed to the lama, then walked toward the cliff. He kept walking right over the edge.”

His audience gazed at him, as if expecting more.

Wu rose and paced along the row of files. The others, even Sung, watched her with deferential expressions. She was, Shan suspected, highly placed in the Party. “You mean these suicides knew they would be reincarnated as some cockroach in a Shanghai sewer.”

Shan stared at the woman, trying to understand whether she was taking him seriously.

“Do you mean they would seek words from a spiritual leader?” Choi inserted.

Shan sensed he was being trapped somehow. He slowly nodded. “Tibetans believe it takes thousands of births as a lower life-form before you can reach a human existence. The greatest fear of many is that they will die and have to restart that cycle.”

Wu turned. Party members didn't wear uniforms, but they often had badges of rank in the form of lapel pins. Hers was a red circle of stars with a lightning bolt inside.

Tuan seemed to be the first to grasp Shan's point. “Prayers. If they found the right holy person, they might be assigned a hundred thousand mantras.”

“Or that holy man might bless what they intended to do as an act of purity and not a sin at all.” With a chill, Shan remembered Wu's badge. It was the sign of the Strike the Root campaign, the government's relentless initiative to undermine and destroy the dissident movement in Tibet.

“Then they could die with a pure heart,” Tuan said. “And they demonstrate their serenity by writing a final verse,” he added in a contemplative voice. The others at the table gazed at him in confusion, and his face flushed with color.

“So this absolution you speak of comes from a high-ranking nun or lama,” Wu observed.

“The kind who would throw off a robe rather than sign a loyalty oath,” Tuan said.

Director Wu's black-pebble eyes shifted from Tuan to Shan without expression. Then an icy grin grew on her face. She stepped to one of the files and began to leaf through it urgently.

Sung dismissed Shan with a wave of his hand. As he stepped away, Shan saw a map of immolation sites taped to the wall by the door, surrounded by notes and photocopies of singed papers bearing what Shan took to be more death poems recovered from immolation sites. On half of them was a crudely drawn oval with a crescent piercing its upper right edge.

*   *   *

Shan had no appetite for lunch. He wandered along the street that circled the town inside the wall, trying again to shake his despair. Sparrows covered the street where a bag of rice had dropped and fallen open. In what passed for a Zhongje traffic jam, three cars were backed up behind a delivery truck as its driver spoke to a pedestrian. He watched as a constable approached the truck and sent it on its way, then followed the policeman back to the little station by the main gate. He slipped on his armband and entered a step behind him.

The constable, a sturdy, open-faced man in his forties, hesitated, eyeing the armband, then pulled the door back open. “Public Security is in the central administration building.”

Shan pushed the door shut. “A man died on the slope two days ago, Corporal. What happened to the body?”

Township constables were the bottom feeders of law enforcement in China. They had little authority, few resources, and often just performed traffic duty and cleaned up after Public Security. It tended to mean they were also the least corruptible. Shan took a chair across from an empty desk. The constable did not hide his displeasure, but took the cue, hanging his jacket on a peg before sitting behind the desk. “I think you need to speak with that major from Lhasa.”

“I used to work in Beijing,” Shan offered. “I put half a dozen senior Public Security officers in prison.”

The corporal's stern expression did not change, but his eyes softened. “Which explains why you were sent to Shangri-la.” He shrugged. “An ambulance came from Lhasa. We usually handle traffic at accident scenes, to clear the way for emergency vehicles. Funny thing is, Major Sung ordered us to close the road outside the gate.”

“I don't understand.”

“From the moment that ambulance arrived to take the body, we were told to block all movement out of town. We weren't being used to help the ambulance. It took a dirt track up the slope, never came near us.”

“You said ‘body.' You know the man was dead.”

“No one said a word. No investigation, just some crime scene tape. No one said there was a death. Except the birds.” The corporal pulled out a pack of chewing gum and offered him a piece.

“Birds?”

“That ambulance came all the way from Lhasa. An hour's drive. I stayed at the gate the whole time, pushing back onlookers, stopping all photography. After thirty minutes, the first vulture started circling. By the time the ambulance came, there were half a dozen in the sky overhead. Some say they can smell dead meat from twenty miles away. The birds don't lie.”

“Another ambulance came the next morning.”

The corporal nodded. “Before dawn.”

“It brought the victim back from treatment.”

“A fucking miracle.”

A radio crackled to life, barking out the report of a traffic accident. The corporal rose, reaching for his jacket. “I witnessed an immolation last year, up north,” he declared. “I was ordered to help recover the body. A former prisoner. He had wrapped wet towels around one arm. Underneath was the only skin that wasn't charred. He had saved his tattoo, a big one that ran all the way up the arm,” the constable continued as he buttoned up his jacket. “‘Fucked by the Motherland,' it said. That was his death poem. When a Public Security officer came, he poured more gas over the tattoo and lit the arm on fire.” He opened the door and offered Shan a mock salute. “I bet that's not in your Commission files.”

Shan followed him out, strangely encouraged by the man's candor, and continued to roam the town. A small grey terrier with the unkempt look of a stray trotted out of the bushes of the little town park and walked beside him.

The thoroughly modern classless town, built to impress Tibetans, was fading into another kind of symbol of China in Tibet. One building near the north gate—residences for higher-level officials—had well-tended plantings and a guard watching two government limousines out front. On one side of that central apartment building were other residential structures, less cared for and adorned with dying bushes in concrete planters. To the opposite side were a handful of shops and cafés and offices, the municipal garages, then the warehouses that kept the town supplied. Even though Zhongje was less than three years old, its cheap building materials, designed and supplied by people who had never been in Tibet, were faring poorly in the harsh Tibetan weather. Faux marble fronts along the ground level of the residences were cracking. Paint on the town wall was peeling away.

When Shan looked down after walking three blocks, the dog was still at his side. He bought a meat dumpling from a street vendor and extended it to the terrier, which seized it and disappeared down an alley.

He passed the traffic accident that had called away the constable, then paused to study the best maintained and most closely guarded building of the entire town, a squat two-story brick structure that housed recreational facilities for Party members. Shan hesitated as he spotted a familiar figure on a bench near the front gate. As Shan sat beside him, Kolsang folded away a letter he had been reading and stuffed it inside his suit coat.

“I am not the only one weary of cafeteria food,” Shan suggested. He recalled that Kolsang was a Party member. But he had not gone inside the Party building, where much better food was doubtlessly available.

Kolsang forced a small smile. “Sometimes fresh air is more rejuvenating than a meal.”

“Some of the immolations occurred in your county.”

Kolsang's raised brow was his only reply.

“Did you know any of them?”

“When I was a boy,” Kolsang said in a distant voice, “I would go with my father to the high pastures to bring the flock down for the winter. It was often cold and rainy up there and we had to sleep in caves or under ledges. He taught me to make fires with yak dung and twigs, but often I could not coax a blaze. Never strike the flint unless you know the flame will spread, he would tell me.”

Kolsang saw Shan's puzzled look. “There were six in my county. I knew four. Commissioner Xie and I were present at two.”

Shan was more confused than ever. “You knew Xie before the Commission?”

Kolsang looked over his shoulder toward the Party house before answering. “I had known him for years. He came to our township on those periodic Religious Affairs inspections of convents and
gompas.
You know, checking for fidelity oaths, reviewing management records. Monks can be terrible recordkeepers. We were being welcomed at a small monastery when I noticed a washtub near the gate that was filled with gasoline. I was about to say something when a monk ran out of a chapel, carrying a flaming torma, one of those butter effigies burned on special ritual days. He stepped into the tub, shouted out ‘Long live the Dalai Lama!' and dropped the torma. He lit up like a torch. He never screamed, never reacted to his pain, just stared at Xie and me as if we were the ones his death was meant for.

“The next day Xie and I got on the phone with Lhasa, said the government had to do something more organized about the immolations. We pointed out that some Western tourists had been scheduled to visit that
gompa,
and we had only narrowly averted an international affair. We had in mind something like increased consultation with the monks over their grievances. A few hours later, the Deputy Secretary called us and thanked us, said our suggestion had inspired him.”