Kingdom (2 page)

‘Why did you stay here? I told everyone they must leave.’

The novice said hoarsely, ‘It was my doing. It was my karma. I found the stranger, I brought him in.’

The Abbot shook his head and sighed.

‘You should feel no shame or guilt, my boy. But perhaps this is the path you must follow. Remember today, then, that whatever they do to you, it is all merely an illusion. The thought forms that we mistake for reality are nothing more than dreams. All the devils of the world are in our imaginations and so is all the pain and suffering. Remember this today.’

And suddenly there was a sound, a terrible crash which echoed through the building, and made the walls shudder. Dorgen Trungpa, for all the teachings of the lama, could not repress a cry of surprise, and a surge of terror gripped his body.

‘Remember my words and all will be well,’ the Abbot was saying as Dorgen Trungpa struggled to gather himself. ‘We must go outside now, my boy.’

Outside, they saw the ancient wooden gate hanging from its broken hinges. For hundreds of years it had kept the monastery safe, but now Chinese soldiers were filing into the courtyard. In the centre was an army jeep and in it stood a short, fat Chinese army officer. His filthy, ill-fitting, olive-green uniform was soaked through and rain was streaming over the peak of his cap and down his face.

Soldiers were filing into the prayer rooms and monks’ quarters and the kitchen and dining hall. They swarmed through the silent abandoned rooms, as if they were searching for something. The Abbot stood in the doorway surveying the chaos before him, the troops that were ransacking his monastery. Yet his face was serene; he was almost smiling.

When the army officer saw the Abbot he raised a clipped cry, and a group of soldiers came forward, weapons raised. At their approach, Dorgen Trungpa flinched and wanted to turn, back into the shelter of the prayer hall. The Abbot made no effort to resist, and so Dorgen Trungpa stayed by his side, transfixed with fear. One soldier smashed the butt of his rifle into the Abbot’s face, and the old man collapsed to the ground. They punched and kicked him and dragged him through the puddles over to the jeep. He collapsed again and again under the hail of blows, only to be lifted up again so that he could be beaten to the ground once more.

And Dorgen Trungpa found that now he had forgotten the teachings of the lama, and was retreating urgently through the hall, striving to escape even as the troops moved towards him. As he turned a corner he was met by soldiers coming the other way. They set upon him like a pack of dogs, pummelling and mauling him until he was inert with pain and bewilderment and offered no more resistance. Then they dragged him to the centre of the courtyard, and flung him down next to the Abbot.

My karma, thought Dorgen Trungpa. I brought this here. My actions have killed us both and destroyed the monastery. And he tried to contemplate his own death with equanimity, as the Chinese officer spat out orders to his soldiers. Then the officer stepped out of his jeep, his face ugly with rage, and addressed the Abbot.

‘You understand Chinese, parasite?’

The Abbot, now on his hands and knees, raised his bruised and weary head and answered in Mandarin: ‘Yes.’

The officer undid the button on the breast packet of his uniform and pulled out a piece of paper. The rain doused it as he held it up to read.

‘On behalf of the peasants of Pemako and the government of the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, we hereby charge you with feudalist practices.’

The officer looked up from the paper and spat on the ground in front of the old lama.

‘You are guilty of systematic exploitation of the peasants, of enslaving them on your land, of taxing them in the form of tithes of butter and yak meat, of using them as unpaid labour in your monastery kitchens whilst you yourselves sit idle and do no work. You have continued these feudalist practices for generations and have sustained and justified this wicked system by scaring the people with stories of eternal hells that do not exist and threats that when they die they will be reborn as vermin if they do not obey you. In short, you have taken advantage of the common people’s ignorance and used superstition and religion as tools of oppression. Furthermore, you are guilty of owning images of the Grand Parasite, the wicked dictator and leader of your feudal empire, the Dalai Lama, who has attempted to split the Motherland and sabotage China’s relations with foreign nations – and of failing to recognize the supreme authority of the Communist Party of China. Furthermore, you are charged with harbouring a foreign spy. We demand that you hand over this man immediately.’

Now the officer snarled at the Abbot:

‘What have you to say, parasite?’

The Abbot remained silent.

In a rage the officer threw the paper to the floor. He stepped towards the Abbot, and swinging his right foot back, he landed his army boot with all the force he could muster under the old man’s chin. There was a sickening crack and the Abbot flipped over onto his back.

Dorgen Trungpa cried out in horror and tried to break free from the restraining grip of two Chinese soldiers but was beaten into submission.

The officer loomed over the broken body of the lama.

‘Get up, parasite. Why are you lying in the wet? Why don’t you levitate? That’s what you tell the peasants you can do.’

The Abbot’s eyes opened slowly. The officer placed his foot on the old man’s neck and shouted down at him:

‘Where is the fugitive spy?’

The Abbot seemed now to be trying to speak, choking for breath. Perhaps expecting to hear an answer to his question, the officer lifted his foot. Gradually the Abbot’s words became audible:

‘Om Mane Padme Hum . . . Om Mane Padme . . .’

At the sound of the chant, the officer spun round and barked an order to the assembled soldiers. Two men stepped forward. The Abbot recognized them; they were fellow Tibetans, outcasts from the village. They had committed serious crimes in the past and so were forced to beg and live outside the community on the edge of the jungle. It was their job to clean the monastery toilets and bury the dead of the village. Their ill-fitting uniforms looked new. They must have been recruited only hours before.

The army officer smiled and said to the two Tibetans, ‘I think the parasite has a headache. Cure him.’

One of the soldiers was carrying a hammer and a four-inch bronze nail in his hands. He had a gloating smirk on his face. The second of the new recruits sat down heavily on the Abbot’s chest and grabbed the old man’s head. The Abbot, as if oblivious to his circumstances, continued his mournful, low chant.

The soldier with the hammer knelt down beside the Abbot and carefully placed the bronze nail in the centre of his forehead. Pausing, he looked up at the officer. The officer briskly nodded his head and with a sickening crack the hammer fell. The nail sank into the Abbot’s skull. Two more blows followed until not a single particle of the nail protruded. The Abbot’s arms waved feebly in the air for a moment then fell limply by his side. Dorgen Trungpa cried out in agony and collapsed to the floor. Silence hung over the courtyard.

Then the officer spoke, and Dorgen Trungpa realized with a dull sense of dread that he was addressing him.

‘So, boy, now that you have seen that justice is done, even in places such as Pemako that are far from Beijing, perhaps you can still be saved from the grip of these evil and insane old men. You are still young. Let us see . . .’

He turned towards the broken gates and shouted an order. Dorgen Trungpa gritted his teeth and cried out in rage and desolation. Two soldiers were dragging a young peasant girl along. She was the daughter of the village’s biggest landowner. She was in her late teens, a beautiful girl, now emitting low moans of terror and struggling weakly against her captors. They marched her up to the young monk. The officer barked another order. The two soldiers holding her ripped off her clothes. Dorgen Trungpa averted his gaze from her naked form, as the soldiers held her upright before him.

‘Now, monk, let’s see you act like a real man. I order you to have sex with this peasant girl.’

The light had gone out in Dorgen Trungpa’s eyes. Nothing in his eighteen years of life had prepared him for this. All he knew was the round of monastery ceremonies, the weeks of prayer and fasting and meditation, the festivals in the village and the order of a life maintained in unison with the forces of the universe. His breath came in short desperate gasps as the soldiers picked him up and thrust him towards the equally terrified girl. He would not look at her nakedness but he could hear her desperate low moans, like a dying animal. The officer shouted encouragement in a sardonic voice.

‘Come on, boy! Forget the lies of these evil old men. Vows of celibacy are nonsense. You have been brainwashed, that is all . . . Now my patience is running out . . . I order you to have sex with this girl and when you have finished you will set fire to the monastery library.’

Before the monk’s eyes, all the horrors that
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
had described to him in rich detail seemed to be coming true: the soul afflicted by awful demons and unspeakable pain at the point of death. But this was life, an unspeakable sort of life, a life Dorgen Trungpa had no powers to comprehend. And he closed his eyes, calmed his breathing and tried, against all the odds, to free his mind.

It was daytime. That was all that Nancy Kelly knew. Where she was, or what time it was, she couldn’t remember. The banging noise started again. Above her head an enormous fan hung from the ceiling, its giant blades turning morosely but failing to generate even the slightest whisper of a breeze. For a second she stared at the fan in confusion and then everything clicked into place: she was in India, in Delhi, in the company apartment. And there was someone knocking on the door.

Cursing no one in particular, Nancy groaned with exhaustion and rolled over in bed. The curtains were little more than diaphanous white sheets and the room was bathed in light. She felt disoriented and sick but she had only been in India for a few hours.

Surely I can’t be ill already, she thought, that would be just too unfair.

She fumbled around on the bedside table, picked up her phone and stared at its clock in confusion, uncertain whether she had changed the settings from New York to Delhi time. She remembered that her plane had landed in the middle of the night, that a driver had ushered her through the crowds of beggars and touts offering to change her dollars and find her cheap hotel rooms, to the safety of the waiting Mercedes. She had sunk back into the almost uncomfortably large leather seat and stared out of the window, watching the colour and chaos of the Delhi night drift by as if it was on a television screen until finally the car had slipped into the darkness of an empty street and deposited her outside the apartment building.

Nancy Kelly had come to Delhi to be the new
International Herald Tribune
South Asia Bureau Chief. She was thirty years old, which was young for the post, but she had been very fortunate with the timing. It was a new stage in her career and equally a new stage in her life. She hoped that it would allow her to put the recent past behind her and that the exoticism and excitements of India would help her forget her last few months in New York, months that had seemed at times to pass as slowly as whole years.

The knocking continued, but Nancy was still too groggy and confused to get out of bed. The message icon was flashing on her phone. Shouting weakly at the noise – ‘Coming, just a minute’ – she opened the message. It was a mail from her ex-boyfriend, James Long, the
Tribune
’s Buenos Aires correspondent. That made her heart sink; she could not help thinking that it was an inauspicious sign that the first message she should receive in India was from him. She had met him five years ago when they had been working together in the New York office; they had dated for three. She had been, unquestionably, in love – but their desires were so different. He wanted to settle down with a wife who stayed at home and looked after his children: that was never going to be her. Finally, he announced he had found someone else, someone he had met whilst she had been on one of her frequent trips abroad – a motherly stay-at-home type. She was from Argentina and James, it seemed, was very lucky: the Buenos Aires job came up the next day and James applied for the post and got it. Either that or he’d been seeing the woman for much longer than either he or Nancy wanted to admit. That was three months ago – she should have seen it coming but she took it very badly. She knew that they weren’t suited but that didn’t stop her being in love.

‘My dearest Nancy, I am so sorry that I did not return your calls. As I explained to you when we last spoke, I felt it was better if . . .’

She stopped reading and then she weighed the phone in the palm of her hand before pressing Delete. She exhaled with relief, as if she had just made the right decision about which wire to cut and had successfully defused a bomb. A few months ago, she observed with the fragility and hollowness that comes after grief, she would have been desperate to hear from him, but now that at last she had almost regained her equilibrium the very last thing she wanted to do was to re-establish contact.

‘My dearest James,’ she said out loud as the diaphanous white curtains stirred gently in the sultry Delhi breeze, ‘I now understand that there will come a day, perhaps not too far in the future, when I will actually get over you . . .’

She managed a forced smile and then looked around the bedroom, almost hoping for encouragement from her new surroundings. Goddamn this knocking, she thought. ‘OK OK,’ she said, and really tried to move herself. She shifted her legs off the bed, rubbed her eyes. She was in one of the most fascinating countries in the world, with a challenging career break ahead of her, and the past was behind her.

Things had slipped into place, almost uncannily. The vacancy in India was announced the same morning that she made up her mind to go abroad. Or more accurately, Dan Fischer, the editor, who was over from Paris, had tapped her on the shoulder and invited her into his office. Anton Herzog, her hero, everybody’s hero at the
Trib
and the longest-ever-serving Delhi Bureau Chief, had gone missing three months earlier. After twenty years in the job, he had vanished without a trace into the mountains of Tibet. Dan Fischer had waited and waited but finally the board had put pressure on him: someone had to be found to fill the post; India was the biggest story in Asia and the paper couldn’t wait indefinitely for Herzog to return. Nancy was offered the job on the spot. Dan didn’t even bother to advertise it on the paper’s internal vacancies board – a fact Nancy would have found far more puzzling had she not been so glad of the opportunity to leave New York. It was a big posting and she had never even set foot in India, but Dan told her she had powerful supporters on the paper, people who admired her writing and her investigative skill. And, of course, not having a partner might actually have been to her advantage – people with partners always found it so much more difficult to move. But she had big boots to fill, Dan had quipped as he shook her warmly by the hand. Anton was a legend – she would have to be at the top of her game. She had smiled gratefully, bewildered by the strange and fortunate turn of events, but it was a huge opportunity and she certainly wasn’t going to quibble about the unorthodox hiring procedure.