Beautiful Ghosts (8 page)

Shan resisted the urge to stare at the old lama, to study his face. Gendun had little trust in words, thought they as often detracted from the truth as led to it. He would never try to reduce to words the complete essence of a thought, a person, a place, because words were incapable of expressing the ultimate truth. But he had begun to express something Shan had not understood before, that the hermits had not come to Zhoka simply because it was a convenient place to reach the hill people, or even because it was a ruined gompa.

Gendun extended his finger in front of the rock and the butterfly climbed onto it. “The child Dawa threw your bag over the edge,” the lama said with a sigh. “I am sorry about your throwing sticks. Your father’s sticks.”

“I strive not to be attached to physical possessions,” Shan said in a tight voice.

Gendun offered a sad smile. “They weren’t physical to you. They were the spark of your father, and grandfather, and fathers before them. They raised the spirits of your ancestors within you.”

For a moment something tightened around Shan’s heart. More than once Shan had explained to Gendun and Lokesh how sometimes, using the old lacquered yarrow sticks, he could sense the presence of his father, even smell the ginger he had often carried in his pocket. “Just some old sticks,” Shan said in a weak voice.

Gendun whispered to the butterfly and it flew away toward Zhoka, as if on an errand. They watched until it disappeared in the distance, then Shan stood and offered a hand to Gendun. “A sky machine,” the lama said as he rose. “One of those sky machines seized him.” His hand rose and his fingers extended then slowly closed as if reaching for something invisible to the rest of them. “Last spring, in the north, I spoke to a shepherd woman who had lost her husband that way. She went out every day and sat on a hill with her beads, searching the sky because she said he could return out of a cloud at any time.” Shan stared at the lama, for a moment paralyzed by what he saw. A tear rolled down Gendun’s cheek. “Surya.” He said the name like a prayer.

Shan heard a tiny gasp and turned to see Lokesh was sitting behind them. He had never seen his old friend so pale. The old Tibetan had seen the tear too, and was watching it with a strange despairing awe as it reached Gendun’s jaw and hung there.

“For over forty years Surya and I prayed together,” Gendun said. “When we were novices our task was to rise together two hours before dawn and light lamps throughout the hermitage, and all these years we never stopped doing it, never asked the new novices to take over. Now I am to pray to keep him away from us. Before him I had never known someone who could take a piece of cloth and pigment and…” Gendun looked back toward the tower, with its vibrant paintings and closed his eyes for a moment. “In one writing Surya found, a lama of three hundred years ago said that the artists of Zhoka spread spirit fire.”

“They could come back,” a worried voice interjected from behind them. Liya was standing at their backs, scanning the hills with her binoculars again. “The soldiers know of this place now.”

But the soldiers had not just learned of the place, Shan knew. They had come here, to the stone tower, not to Zhoka, not to the illegal birthday festival. They had behaved as though the tower were their destination. As if someone had ordered the troops in the hills away so they could come to the tower. And if they knew of it already why hadn’t they destroyed it? Patrols in the area often carried black spray paint to eradicate any such painted artifacts they discovered, or explosives to collapse such structures. Shan remembered the way the lead soldier from the helicopter squad had hesitated, hand to his ear, just before they had closed around Surya. The soldier had been taking instructions by radio, probably from someone in the cockpit of the helicopter, someone, impossibly, looking for the monk.

“We must go deep into the mountains,” Liya said. “Zhoka is too dangerous now. And you can’t go to town, Shan. The valley is too dangerous.”

In the valley, Shan knew, patrols would be aggressively checking identity papers. Shan had no papers, had no right to be anywhere but in a gulag prison, had a bounty on his head. Lokesh stood and looked toward the sun, an hour above the horizon, then toward the southern mountains. Jara was on the next ridge, limping on his injured foot. Lokesh glanced at Shan, who nodded, struggling to keep the worry from his face.

“The girl,” Lokesh said. Without another word he set off along the southern trail, in the direction Dawa had last been seen.

Gendun looked at Liya. “Would it be possible to get two blankets? And a little food and water?”

“We will take you to where there are supplies. Close by,” Liya said. “You can sleep there.”

“Not for me. They are for Shan. He is going on retreat.”

Liya offered a forced smile, as if Gendun had told a bad joke.

“Rinpoche,” Shan said in a plaintive tone.

There was never tension, never a wall between Shan and Gendun except the one that was there now. He had experienced it many times, each time more painful than the one before. To Gendun nothing should interfere with Shan’s planned retreat, nothing was worth Shan neglecting his deity. But for Shan there was something vastly more important, no matter how adamantly Gendun rejected the notion. No matter how endangered the health of Shan’s own deity might be, for Shan, protecting the old lamas would always be more important.

“Do not let this thing separate you, Shan,” Gendun said. He was not referring to the day’s events, Shan knew, but to the thing that separated Shan from his deity. To Gendun the shadow of Shan’s prior incarnation as a senior Beijing investigator hung about him like a jealous ghost, encouraging him to become involved in unimportant events, drawn to the workings of logic and cause and effect that Gendun considered traps for the spiritually aware.

“Rinpoche, Liya must take you to the trail to the hermitage in the morning,” Shan said. He regretted the words even as they left his tongue. They sounded too much like a demand.

“At dawn I will be at the new chorten,” Gendun said. “And the next dawn after that. There are words to be spoken. All these years no one has paid the reverence that is owed.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said, gazing into the old face, weathered as a river stone.

“Surya was to stay. Now I will.”

“In the ruins?”

“In the gompa,” Gendun said, as if the monastery still existed.

“Someone died there.”

“Hundreds died there.”

“Surely it can wait.”

“It cannot. Nor can your retreat.”

Shan looked in the direction of Zhoka. Miracles were going to happen there, Lokesh had said. But all Shan knew for certain was that death had happened there, that death lingered there, and the dark secrets that had caused the death.

“Promise me, Shan,” the lama said, and there it was again, stabbing Shan like a blade, the torment in Gendun’s eyes.

“If I could have seen all this,” Shan said with a wrench in his heart, “if I had only known, I would have stayed in prison.” He felt responsible. When he closed his eyes he saw a fateful path, a door that had been locked until Shan had arrived at Yerpa. He was the one who had introduced Gendun to the outside world, who had helped Gendun travel into modern Tibet, who had introduced him, and through him Surya, to the gulag camps and the soldiers.

Gendun began tightening the laces of the tattered workboots he wore under his robes. “If I had known all this,” the lama said with a calm smile, “I would have come years ago.” He straightened and began walking toward Zhoka.

“Please, Shan, they’ll arrest you,” Liya said in a knowing voice. “Don’t do it. If you go to town we’ll never see you again, I know it.” When Shan returned her steady stare without speaking, she sighed, then fell in behind the lama.

As he stood alone on the windswept crest, desperately trying to grasp the events of the day, Shan’s fingers suddenly closed around the bloodstained disc he had found in the tunnel. He pulled it from his pocket, wiped it with grass, and held it up in the last light of the day. It was heavy, as if made of metal, though coated with red vinyl, with bands of green spaced evenly along its raised outer rim. In its center was the image of a savage yellow eye. He stared at it a long time before he could make sense of the English words around the eye. Lone Wolf Casino. Reno, Nevada.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Nights in Tibet were battlefields for the soul. Shan had seen brave young men stare into the dark endless sky and burst into tears. Lamas tested novices by having them sit for hours under the stars, often by the charnel grounds where the dead lay offered for sky burial. Of all the lands on earth only here, the highest of all, were the skies so black, the stars so dense, the frailty of the human so apparent each night.

In prison, his cellmates had pried up a piece of the tin roof over their barracks. They had moved a bunk under the hole and taken turns lying under the hole, staring out at the stars. A bitter young Tibetan, a drug dealer from Lhasa, had mocked the old men for doing so, saying he understood risking beating and extended sentences for trying to escape past the wire but not just for an escape to the stars. After a few months he had begun waiting his turn for the bunk. Even now Shan associated the stars with freedom and when troubled he would sit, sometimes for hours, watching them, sometimes speaking to them, sometimes watching for the souls of his dead parents perhaps flickering among them.

But tonight the sky tore at him. More than once he thought he heard screams coming from the sky, and every few minutes a shiver ran down his spine. There seemed to be something new about the dark this night, as if the terrible blackness of the tunnels had slipped the bounds of earth and was stalking him.

By midnight clouds filled the sky. It grew so dim he dared not continue down the treacherous slopes. He sat against a rock and fell into a fitful sleep, woke cold and shaking after a nightmare vision of Gendun lying bleeding and broken in the tunnels of Zhoka.

By the time the sky cleared, a half moon had risen and he quickly found his way over the steep ridges, reaching the crest of the final ridge that sloped down into the valley just as the eastern sky began to glow with a hint of dawn. In the distance, still miles away, was the orange shimmer of the streetlights of Lhadrung. He was about to begin the final descent when he halted. A faint scent of wood smoke wafted along the ridge.

Shan ventured warily along the crest for a hundred yards, then heard a lamb bleat. Below him in a gentle swale was the dim outline of a house and two small structures, one with a mound of hay stacked against one wall. He stepped closer and was a hundred feet away when a dog began barking. No one came out, though he saw a dim light, probably from a single butter lamp, past the door of the house, which stood ajar. The lamb bleated again, then another. The dog, invisible in the darkness, snarled now, but did not show itself. Shan backed slowly away, over the ridge, on to Lhadrung.

He approached the town quickly, jogging through the long dawn shadows along the dirt road that led from the mountains, stopping every few minutes in the cover of thickets to survey the valley. There was no sign of helicopters overhead, nor of the dust plumes raised by troop trucks when they patrolled the valley. At the edge of town he mingled with Tibetans arriving with produce for the market, entering the market square with them, then dropping into the shadows of the maze of alleys surrounding it.

Shan had heard descriptions of the Lhadrung that had existed fifty years earlier, a thriving Tibetan community of simple, small houses, each with its own courtyard, each with its own little shrine, arrayed around a small gompa that served the people of the central valley. By the time the People’s Liberation Army arrived in the valley, scarred and vengeful from months of guerrilla fighting, the residents expected the gompa to be leveled, as others throughout Tibet had been. The army leveled not just the gompa but nearly the entire town, first with aerial bombs, then with bulldozers. The Chinese town that had grown in its place was a grid of lifeless grey buildings over which towered the four-story structure that served as headquarters for the county administration.

Since leaving prison Shan had carefully avoided the government center, had confined his few town visits to the market on the east side of the town. Much had changed at the building since he had walked out of it, unexpectedly freed, the year before. The front of the structure, but only the front, had been painted bright white, which seemed only to highlight the dirty grey of the other sides. No one had bothered to remove the splatters of paint from the windows. The first-floor windows surrounding the metal entry doors, however, had all been covered with posters fastened inside the glass, filled with images that were familiar fixtures of public places throughout China. On one poster smiling Chinese girls with ribbons in their hair drove tractors past rows of cotton, the red flag of the People’s Republic flying from each tractor. On another an old woman looked out over a mountain range, a rifle on her shoulder, a commemoration of past heroes. On a new concrete pedestal beside the entrance was a statue cast of marble chips, the head and shoulders of Mao, in the young, cheerful aspect that had become popular in Party circles. Two trees with the shape of gingkos had been placed on either side of the doors. They were already dead, a stark reminder about Beijing’s efforts to transplant things Chinese into a world where they could find no roots. Incredibly, beside one of the dead trees three beggars sat against the wall of the building. Shan slipped along the perimeter of the small square in front of the building, studying the three figures. There should be no beggars. Colonel Tan did not tolerate beggars, certainly would not permit them in front of the seat of county government.

He stepped into the shadowed doorway of a closed restaurant and studied the scene warily. Two cars were parked in the alley at the side of the building. One, a black Red Flag limousine at least twenty years old, appeared to be the vehicle used by Colonel Tan. In front of the Red Flag was a silver sedan, a recent model of Japanese manufacture. He looked back at the beggars. Two of them, a figure whose face was obscured with burlap sacking and the man beside him, draped in a tattered blanket, sat with heads tilted toward the dry cracked earth in front of them. The third, an old woman whose left eye was milky white, tapped a stick against a traditional metal alms bowl. Near the edge of the square, a small knot of Tibetans stood at the rear of a truck, watching the three uneasily. They were not accustomed to seeing beggars. Buddhist teaching would tell them to offer alms. Government teaching insisted they did not.