Beautiful Ghosts (10 page)

Tan took two steps toward Shan and snapped his arm as though holding a whip, pointing toward the door again.

Shan silently rose, walked past Tan, and stepped back into the alley. He had already taken ten paces when he heard Tan mutter a low curse behind him. Two men were climbing into the silver car, pausing as they saw Tan in the doorway. Shan recognized them as the two he had seen on the front steps. The shorter man with the unkempt hair, a suit coat now over his vest, waved stiffly and called out a greeting to the colonel. The taller man offered an icy grin and stepped into the center of the alley, blocking Shan’s path. He did not look at Shan, however, but stared over Shan’s shoulder toward Tan with an expression of curiosity. The shorter man studied Shan warily, then offered a disappointed sigh and turned to Tan. “This is the man I told you about, who was watching us from the shadows in front of the building,” he announced. “You know him?”

Shan clenched his jaw and stared at the man with new interest. He had thought he had been well hidden, had not even seen the man look in his direction. Another figure was in the car, the Western woman who had appeared on the steps, the art historian named McDowell.

“One of the reformed prisoners,” Tan replied without hesitation. “Sometimes they wander aimlessly around the district. They hate us when they are behind wire but can’t bear to leave us when we free them. Public Security doctors classify it as a psychological disorder,” he added with studied disinterest.

“Sometimes old criminals commit new crimes,” the stranger observed. “It is often productive to question them. There is no better informant than a former prisoner.”

Tan nodded slowly. “Of course. But not those from our camp in the valley. They have been well conditioned by the time they are permitted to leave. Most have little left to contribute. They just wander into town sometimes, looking for a job, or a meal. Pitiful creatures. This one, his family is destroyed, his reputation ruined, he lives from one meal to the next. I gave him the address for the Tibetan Relief Association. He knows he could be arrested again on my command,” Tan added pointedly.

“But he’s Han.”

“Not any more,” Tan snapped impatiently, pushing Shan toward the shadows as he stepped past.

Shan turned back to face the man in the vest, who for the moment appeared more curious about the colonel than him. Then the stranger slowly turned to examine Shan, gazing at his scuffed tattered work boots, the threadbare pants that were two sizes too big, the brown quilted jacket with frayed sleeves, the small red embroidered vase on its shoulder, the symbolic depository of wisdom, placed there by a woman whose herding camp Lokesh and Shan had shared during a winter storm.

The man reached into his pocket and produced a few coins which he pushed into Shan’s hand, then frowned and stepped down the alley as the tall polished man opened the driver’s door of the silver car and settled behind the wheel, speaking to the woman who sat beside him. Shan turned to see the short man gaze into the darkened doorway where Tan had taken Shan. The man at the wheel tapped the horn and his companion jogged to the car. A moment later they sped away.

When Shan turned Tan was still staring after the car. The strange ambivalence he had shown in the storeroom was gone, replaced by the cold fury that was never totally absent from his face. “It won’t be the same this time,” the colonel snapped. “If you give me reason to put you back behind the wire, any reason,” he said, his eyes still on the street, “you’ll never see daylight again.”

Shan sat with Surya another quarter hour after Tan disappeared into the government center, but the monk still did not acknowledge him, only stared forlornly into the dirt at his feet, wringing his fingers, sometimes gasping and fighting for breath. Surya had gone to some cold dismal place inside himself, from which no one else could hope to extract him.

“What words has he spoken here?” Shan asked the man wrapped in the blanket, the one who had tried to trip him previously. The man pushed his open palm toward Shan. As Shan dropped into it the coins the stranger in the alley had given him he asked himself again why Tan would permit begging. I would prefer Surya to go, Tan had said. As if someone other than Tan wanted him to stay. And if they let Surya beg in the central square, they could not stop the others. But why Surya? Not because of the killing at Zhoka. He recalled the three strangers and the way they had examined the thangka on the steps. Because he was an artist?

The man pushed back the blanket from his head, as if Shan had now bought the right to see his face. “He sang some songs, in a whisper,” the second beggar said in a nervous voice. His cheeks were disfigured with jagged scars, the kind raised by beatings with truncheons. He repeatedly glanced toward the steps. “Some old children’s songs, like my mother used to sing to me. He asked me about Chinese magic.”

“Magic?”

“He had never seen trucks or cars. He called them Chinese carts. He asked how they could move without horses or yaks.” The beggar looked at the coins in his hand with a reluctant, frustrated expression, as if they obliged him to answer Shan’s questions. “He asked if the great abbot could make them fly in the air, too.” The man glanced up at Shan. His nose had a jagged angle to it, the look of having been broken.

“Abbot? What abbot?”

“That’s what I asked him. He said he met a powerful abbot in the mountains, who could make great magic.” The man glanced warily at Shan. “Is it true?” he asked in a more urgent, lower voice. “Has an abbot come for the people?”

Shan looked in confusion toward the distant peaks. “I don’t know what is happening in the mountains.” He studied Surya again. “Did he say what they asked him?”

The man shrugged. “They always ask the same things, don’t they?”

“You took his apple,” Shan observed.

The man shrugged again. “Look at him. He no longer wants anything of this world. I’ve seen it before, I saw the way they threw him out the door, the way he cried when they left, because they wouldn’t listen anymore. He said he had to go to the place with the wire, where old lamas are kept until they die.” The beggar stuffed the coins into his pocket and pushed the blanket back over his head.

Shan shifted through his pockets and found a small
tsa-tsa,
a clay tablet shaped in the image of a saint. He dropped the tsa-tsa into the man’s lap. “You didn’t say what Surya told them.” While the monk had not seemed interested in Shan’s questions, and may have ignored those of interrogators, he still seemed to believe there were things that had to be said.

The beggar pushed the blanket from his head with a frown, then slowly cupped his hands around the clay image. A strange mix of resentment and gratitude filled his eyes when he replied. “They asked about caves, about shrines, about symbols in paintings. They showed him some old thangkas. He kept saying he was a murderer. He kept saying he didn’t know where any more paintings were.”

“He told you this?”

“I heard.”

Shan grimaced, chiding himself for not seeing the obvious. “You’re an informer.”

“Sure. You think I would sit in Tan’s square if they didn’t tell me to?”

“Why would they ask about paintings?”

Again the man shrugged. “Must be a new campaign,” he said, meaning a political initiative. “That was all the old man said, except a warning as they tossed him outside. He said earth taming temples are too dangerous for people like them. As if they would care.” The beggar stuffed the tsa-tsa inside his blanket and covered his head again.

As if they would care. But the old Tibetans would care very much about an earth temple. The beggar’s words echoed in Shan’s mind as he walked through the alleyways. It did not seem possible, but yet it could explain much. Shan had not heard Tibetans speak of the earth taming temples since prison, where they had been woven into the tales told by the oldest lamas on winter nights. Centuries earlier, the construction of Tibet’s monasteries, once numbering in the thousands, had begun with the building of a series of temples in far-reaching concentric rings centered on the country’s most sacred temple, the Jokhang, in Lhasa, over a hundred miles to the northwest. The Jokhang has been built to anchor the heart of the supreme land demon, which had first resisted the introduction of Buddhism. Each of the outlying temples had been constructed on the appendages of the vast demon, some located hundreds of miles from Lhasa. The network kept the land and its people in harmony. Surya had spoken about being nailed to the earth. Shan had not connected the words to the old tales. It was part of the tradition, that the earth temples kept evil demons at bay by pinning them to the earth with sacred nails or daggers.

Though once considered the most important places of spiritual power in Tibet, earth taming temples were a thing of ancient history to most. But they would not be to Gendun, or Surya, or Lokesh. Though some of the locations were still known, most were lost, although he now recalled debate in prison about the old legend that one was located in the region of Lhadrung. Why would Surya suddenly speak of Zhoka as an earth taming temple, Shan wondered. Because, he suddenly recalled, Surya had found an old book in a cave.

*   *   *

Ten minutes later Shan was walking at the edge of town, watching for a truck that might be heading toward the mountains, when a sudden clamor rose from past the market. He heard applause, and a voice speaking from a public address system. It took him only five minutes to reach the crowd assembled on the athletic field used by the local school. A podium had been erected in front of the small cinder block bleachers, by another bust of Mao on a cement pillar, and a man in a suit was introducing a special guest from Beijing, a renowned scientist, the youngest director ever of his famed institution. A banner ran from the flagpole by the podium to the bleachers, announcing a tribute for Director Ming of the Museum of Antiquities in Beijing, presented by the Chinese Tibetan Friendship Society.

As the assembly of perhaps a hundred people, nearly all Han Chinese, applauded, a man in a blue suit climbed to the podium, his back to Shan. He accepted the microphone from his host. “It is I who applaud you,” he said in a polished voice, once in Mandarin and again in Tibetan. “You are the true heroes of the great reform, you are the ones who have learned how to blend the strengths of all our great cultures.”

Shan stared in disbelief as the man turned and showed his face. It was the tall, well-groomed man from the steps, one of those Tan had tried to avoid. He was the head of the most prestigious museum in Beijing, perhaps in all of China. What was he doing in Lhadrung? Shan listened for several minutes as Director Ming spoke in an earnest voice about the need to meld the great cultures of China, of how the effort was no less a challenge for those in Beijing than for those in Lhadrung. He spoke of how he had decided to locate his summer workshop in Lhadrung due to the fertile ground it represented for that effort, because it was a county where so few Chinese to date had come to live, and which still had much history to share. To emphasize his point he produced a white silk cloth, a khata, a ceremonial Tibetan scarf, raised it with both hands, and with a dramatic air tied it around the neck of the Mao bust. The assembly broke into another round of applause.

Shan retreated, wary of the soldiers who always watched over public assemblies, but as he stepped away from the field he saw the auburn-haired woman sitting in the driver’s seat of the silver car, leaning back, reading a book. He looked to make certain no patrols were near, and approached the open window of the car.

“You gave an apple to a friend of mine,” he said quietly, in English. “Thank you.”

The woman looked up with a thin smile. “I tried to give it to him. I’m not sure he even saw it.” Her voice was sad but her grin remained. “Can you speak with Surya? Maybe he needs to speak with someone he knows better.” A small Tibetan boy appeared, squeezing around Shan, handing the woman a bottle of orange drink.

“Thuchechey,”
the woman said, thanking the boy in Tibetan as she handed him a coin worth four times the cost of the drink. The boy grabbed it and darted away with a cry of glee.

“He can’t be reached right now,” Shan said.

“Sounds like you were trying to phone him up,” the woman said. He could not place her accent. She did not sound American.

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean. It’s bloody awful. Please, do you really know him?” She gestured to the seat beside her. “Get in. Please. If you care for him we should speak.”

Shan looked about, half suspecting to see soldiers closing in. The crowd was applauding again, and a woman was on the stage, presenting something to their visiting celebrity.

He studied the woman a moment. She knew Surya. But that was impossible. “Did you meet with him in the mountains?” Shan asked as he slipped in beside her.

“Once. I wasn’t on every visit,” she said. Her voice was soft and refined, well-educated. “My name is McDowell. Elizabeth McDowell. My friends call me Punji, like the sharp bamboo stick.”

Shan did not offer his own name. “What visits? Why go to the ruins?”

“It’s Director Ming’s annual summer seminar. His workshop for graduate students. He’s doing an inventory of ancient sites. Students are helping for the summer, and some of his assistant curators.” On the seat beside McDowell were several papers, including some oversized envelopes, all with the return address of the Tibetan Children’s Relief Fund, at a street in London.

“Surya needs to go back into the mountains,” Shan said, “to be with his friends.”

“He denies his name is Surya,” McDowell reminded Shan. “He says Surya died.”

As Shan tried to inconspicuously study the loose papers under the envelopes, the door behind him opened and someone climbed inside. McDowell dropped her book on the envelopes, switched on the engine and eased the car into the street.

“He’s had a terrible shock,” Shan said. “Someone died. He is … inexperienced. His whole life has been his art.”

“Study only the absolute,” a smooth voice interjected from the rear seat. Shan turned to see Director Ming smiling at him.