Beautiful Ghosts (3 page)

Shan stared at the monk, his confusion greater than ever. Surya knew about the dead man. Had Surya somehow been trying to explain what had happened to Atso?

“Listen to that little girl,” Surya blurted out. “She is understanding.” The monk abruptly stood and stepped back toward the courtyard. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a confused glance. There was no little girl. The only children they had seen had been Jara’s sons.

Today will be the end of all things.
Surya’s words echoed in Shan’s mind as he stepped back into the courtyard with Lokesh, the long narrow brush in his pocket. It would indeed be the end for Gendun and the monks if soldiers came.

He forced himself to focus on the chant and the reverent Tibetans in the courtyard. Jara stood with his wife ten feet from the chorten, watching the young monk who had taken up the chant, nodding as Surya settled beside the monk and joined the chant. Lokesh nudged Shan’s arm. Jara’s wife had one arm around a young girl, no more than eight or nine years, who huddled between Jara and the woman.

“She is my sister’s daughter,” Jara explained as Shan approached with his gaze on the girl. “From a city in Szechuan Province, hundreds of miles to the east, come to us to learn about life in Tibet. Her parents were from these mountains, but they were sent to work in a Chinese factory before she was born. She has never been here, never even been with Tibetans except her parents.”

“That statue,” Shan said. “Do you know where it came from?” As he watched, one of the old Tibetan women, then a second, rose and walked back into the shadows, toward where Atso’s body lay.

“There are many like it, if you know where to look,” the herder replied. “That one found the first god that was slaughtered, the big man,” he said, nodding toward a huge ox-like herder in a dirty fleece vest standing thirty feet away. “He said godkillers are the worse kind of demons. He brought one of the dead ones to us, in case someone in my family could heal it.”

“Are the godkillers the ones you meant,” Shan asked, “the ones who kill for a word? What word?”

The question seemed to hit Jara like a physical blow. He recoiled, then pressed a fist against his mouth, as if he feared what might escape, and stepped away.

“What is it?” the girl blurted out, her eyes locked on Surya, who sat only a few feet away. “What is wrong with these poor men?”

“It’s just a sound that souls make,” Lokesh explained with a satisfied grin. The words sent the girl deeper into her aunt’s apron.

“They don’t teach how souls speak in those factory towns,” Jara’s wife said, warning in her voice.

“But something in her is trying to listen,” Lokesh observed as the girl straightened, her head slightly cocked, her fear seemingly replaced with wonder as she gazed at Surya. One of the old Tibetans reappeared, her face clouded with worry, but she did not spread alarm. She was trying to control her fear, Shan saw. Despite Atso’s death she did not wish to disturb their first festival in many years.

“It scares me,” Jara’s wife confided in a nervous voice. “All these monks. If anyone from town…”

“My mother said each year this day is full of miracles,” Lokesh said, rubbing his grizzled white jaw thoughtfully. “Saints could appear from some
bayal,
she told me,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, referring to the traditional hidden lands inhabited by deities and saints. “It is a time for joy, not fear. When is the last time you celebrated this day?”

The woman turned her head away, but Shan could not tell if she was embarrassed or just trying to ignore Lokesh. After a moment her head slowly turned back toward Surya. “I was just a girl,” she said with a tiny, distant smile.

Lokesh turned toward a clay jar on a flat stone behind them, one of several scattered around the old courtyard, dipped his hand inside, then extended it toward her. She pulled her hands behind her back as though afraid, then, hesitantly, brought one hand forward and let Lokesh pour some of the white flour from the jar onto her palm. The woman stared uncertainly at her hand.

Lokesh grinned and made several small, upward motions with his open hand.

“I have a cousin who is in prison for doing what you ask,” the woman said, gazing solemnly at the flour Lokesh had placed in her palm. She sighed, then abruptly threw the contents of her hand into the air, a gleeful cry escaping her husband’s lips as she did so. In the next moment Lokesh did likewise, so that they were enveloped in a small cloud of barley flour.

The woman’s tense face cracked with a smile as Lokesh danced a little jig, his arms outstretched at his sides, looking so light it seemed he might float away. She flung more flour into the air, then clapped her hands as she raised her face to let the flour drift onto her skin. “He is alive for another year!” she called out. The cry was taken up by several of the older Tibetans, who began reaching into the jars themselves.

Throwing barley flour into the air was a traditional act of celebration, but the government had made it a crime for Tibetans to do so on this particular day. For today was the birthday of the exiled Dalai Lama.

“Lha gyal lo!”
Lokesh called toward the sky. “Victory to the gods!”

The woman paused, looking over Shan’s shoulder and he turned to see the girl standing behind them, worry back on her face. Her aunt threw a handful of flour over the girl, who backed away from the cloud as if frightened of it.

As the woman studied the girl, her glee disappeared. She motioned the girl back toward Surya and the younger chanter.

But as Shan retreated several steps, the girl followed him. He lowered himself onto a rock and after a moment’s hesitation the girl sat beside him.

“Is it all right?” she asked him in a timid voice. She had switched to Chinese.

“All right?” Shan replied in Tibetan.

“May they do this?”

Suddenly Shan could not bear to look into the girl’s face. When he did not answer the girl began to nervously wipe the flour dust from her cheeks.

He reached out and gently pushed her arm down. “They did not have to ask me.”

“You’re Chinese.”

He recalled a day five years earlier when soldiers had heaved him from a truck into the gulag compound near Lhadrung. He had lain facedown in the cold mud, semiconscious, not knowing where he was, bleeding from one ear, pain spiking from his arms and belly where electroshock clips had been fastened, his eyes and mind struggling to focus because of the interrogation drugs still in his system. “From this day forward, your pain will subside,” a quiet voice had suddenly whispered, and Shan had forced his eyes open to gaze into the serene face of an old Tibetan who, Shan soon learned, was a lama in his fourth decade of imprisonment. “In all your life it will not be so bad again,” the lama explained as he had helped Shan to his feet. But during the year since his release Shan had discovered a new pain that not even the lamas could cure, an agony of guilt that could be triggered by the innocent question of a young girl.

He put his hand on the girl’s arm to stop her. “I wish the Dalai Lama was with his people,” Shan said in a near whisper. “I wish him a long life.”

“You mean you’re Buddhist?”

A bowl of buttered tea was thrust over Shan’s shoulder.

“Something like that.” Lokesh chuckled and squatted before them, sipping a second bowl. “When I was young,” he continued, gazing solemnly at the girl, “my mother would take me deep into the mountains to see old suspension bridges over bottomless chasms. The bridges connected us to the outside world. No one knew how they were made or what held them up. They seemed impossible to build. When I asked, my mother said they were just there, because we needed them. That is our Shan.”

“But is it all right?” the girl asked Shan again in her meek, earnest tone.

“What is your name?” Shan asked.

“Dawa. My father is a model worker in a Chinese factory,” she added quickly. “He saved all year to be able to send me here. He could afford only the bus fare for me. I have never been out of the city.” Shan glanced at Lokesh. Listen to the little girl, Surya had said as if in warning. But Dawa did not even know Tibet.

“Dawa, I want it to be all right. Do you want it to be?” Was that Surya’s point, Shan wondered, that they could only understand the day’s strange events by looking on them as an outsider?

The girl shyly nodded, searching Shan’s face. “How can a Chinese do such things?” she asked. “Be a bridge. Does he mean you are part Tibetan?”

“Other Chinese put me in prison, not because I committed a crime but because they feared I would tell the truth. I wanted to die then. I was going to die. But Lokesh and others like him taught me how to live again.”

The girl seemed unconvinced. Shan lifted a jar of flour and extended it toward her. She slowly shifted her gaze to the jar and then, her fingers trembling, she pulled some flour from it. A shiver of excitement seemed to course through her, then she threw the flour over their heads and solemnly studied it as it drifted downward. “I saw where they go. I think I know the way to the hidden land,” she declared uncertainly, looking at Surya, who had risen from his seat beside the younger chanter and was now moving across the yard in a slow, graceful gait.

Shan looked at her, not understanding, then watched as the girl followed the monk into the ruins. A sudden unfamiliar sound caused him to turn toward the chorten. Laughter. Several of the older Tibetans were laughing, throwing flour over each other’s heads. The festival was truly under way.

But then a hand closed around his arm. Liya was at his side, her face pale. She gestured with her head toward the old stone tower on the ridge above the ruins, nearly a mile away.

At first Shan saw nothing but then something green at the base of the tower moved and his heart leapt into his throat. There were soldiers at the tower, at least a dozen. He quickly surveyed the yard. No one else had noticed that the army was watching. If the Tibetans were warned they would panic and try to flee, though most lived to the west, above the valley, and their path home was now blocked.

“You have to tell him,” Liya said. “You have to try,” she added in a forlorn tone.

Shan slowly nodded, watched as Liya disappeared into the nearest alleyway, then gazed upon the joyful Tibetans. They may have finally forgotten the hard existence they eked out of the rocky slopes, forgotten the fears that always shadowed them, but their jubilation would be short lived. He began searching for Gendun.

He found the lama five minutes later, sitting in a small clearing at the northern edge of the grounds, looking into the five-hundred-foot-deep chasm that abutted the northern edge of the ruins. Strangely, Gendun sat with his legs casually extended over the edge of the chasm. He was watching a hawk soar in the updrafts above the gorge, his eyes shining with pleasure. He did not turn but patted the rock beside him, inviting Shan to sit. “I have not known such a day since I was a boy,” the lama said. “We would erect a white tent by the monastery in the mountains where I was born. We sang all day. The monks would fasten a secret blessing to the top of a high pole and we would take turns climbing, trying to retrieve it.”

“There are soldiers,” Shan said quietly, studying the tattered lines of ropes and splintered wood that hung from the edge of the opposite side of the chasm, the remains of the old bridge that had once connected to the clearing, the northern foregate yard of the old gompa.

As though in reproach, Gendun turned his head to gaze toward a long stone atop a low mound of rubble, a lintel stone from over a collapsed doorway. Someone had cleared the rubble from it, exposing words that had been painted across it, faded but still legible. S
TUDY
O
NLY THE
A
BSOLUTE
. On the lintel stood a framed portrait of the Dalai Lama and a fragment of a life-sized bronze statue, a graceful, upcurved hand.

“Once this would have been a festival day for all the people,” Gendun said. His voice was like dry grass rustling in the breeze. “We are making it so again. This is the beginning.”

For Gendun it was the beginning, but Surya said it was the end. Shan looked back at the legend on the stone, then searched Gendun’s face carefully. The old lama’s countenance could be as complex as the sky. His eyes had grown more sober. He would not abide talk of dangers to the monks, or of murderers or foreigners stalking the hills. Shan replayed in his mind’s eye the scene of Gendun looking at Atso. The lama had not been surprised, had not expressed remorse, but offered words of rejoicing on seeing the old man’s body.

“Rinpoche, I do not understand what is happening,” he said at last, using the form of address for a revered teacher.

“We do not just dedicate the shrine today,” Gendun declared. “We are rededicating the gompa. Zhoka is going to live again. Surya is going to reside here.”

Something icy gripped Shan’s belly. Surya and Gendun did not understand the tyrannical, often vengeful nature of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, to whom an unlicensed monk was a criminal. They did not know Colonel Tan, who had the authority to condemn the monks to labor camp without a trial.

As Shan looked at Gendun again he felt a sudden, deep sadness. It was the way the Tibetans defended themselves, taking virtuous positions against impossible odds. In the original war against the Chinese invaders thousands of Tibetans had charged machine guns with muskets and swords, or holding only prayers in their hands. Coming to Zhoka was Surya’s way of doing the same thing. “Lha gyal lo,” Shan said at last in a tight voice.

The old lama nodded somberly.

“Why now?” Shan asked.

Gendun waved his hand toward the ruins. “Zhoka was a very important place once, a place of great miracles. There are many things to learn here, things that must be revived.”

Shan surveyed the abandoned gompa. The deep bowl in which the monastery had been built was over five hundred yards across at its base, and the ruins spilled up the slopes. Many of the rock walls that had defined courtyards and gardens had survived, even a number of the building walls stood, though none could be called intact. One huge wall, the end of what must have been an assembly hall, towered nearly twenty feet high, with a jagged six-foot hole in its center. Charred floor and roof timbers jutted from walls that leaned precariously. Shan knew little about Zhoka, except that it had been famed for its artists. Many of Zhoka’s remaining walls bore fragments of paintings like the broken image of a deer Surya had held. Surya was Yerpa’s most accomplished artist, the creator of magnificent
thangkas,
traditional Tibetan cloth paintings, and murals that graced the walls of the hermitage. For Surya, Lokesh had once said, his art was the way he prayed. But Gendun was sending him to live in a place where all the art had died.