Mandarin Gate (29 page)

Shan found himself at a bus stop, lingering in a crowd of children in school uniforms. He let the crowd push him as a bus approached, did not turn back even as he found himself going up the steps of the bus. He sat at a window, not seeing at first, not feeling anything except impossibly tired.

When he shook himself awake, the bus, nearly empty, was on the outskirts of town. Tracts of shabby houses were giving way to fields and arid pastures. He got out at the next stop, crossed to the stop on the opposite side of the street and sat on its plastic bench. He heard a laugh and turned, seeing the back of a tall Tibetan with shaggy white hair, dressed in tattered clothes, and for a moment felt the ridiculous hope that it was Lokesh. Then the man turned and saw Shan, lowered his head and hurried away.

The hill on which he sat overlooked the town. Chamdo was Tibet’s third-largest city but it was isolated, so remote that it was seldom visited by outsiders, and even those were permitted only in organized groups. It was the perfect place for the government to conduct operations out of the public eye. He saw the warehouse complex where Jigten was loading the truck, then located the long block of buildings that comprised the Institute, some of the best-kept structures in the city. Jamyang had been there, at the anonymous complex in the anonymous, remote city. He had left in a suit and reappeared in a robe.

An hour later he was back at the bus stop where he had started, studying its city map, tracing the shaded, anonymous square of land that comprised the Institute. He turned for a moment, and realized that he was looking at the tea shop, unconsciously searching for Meng. Another mystery kept nagging at the edge of his consciousness, the mystery of why she so unsettled him. It was not fear of her he felt when he was with her. It was fear of himself.

Retreating from the corner, he followed the side street along the western wall of the compound. A row of well-manicured houses sharing common walls stretched out in front of the wall. At the end of the first block he crossed and walked slowly, studying the houses. They all had the same hardware on the doors and windows. There was no way through them, no way around them. They were just a buffer, like a moat around a fortress.

He glanced down the street, mindful of two men in spotless coveralls leaning on brooms at either end of the block, then approached the nearest door. It was locked. The window by the door was covered by a curtain but he could see through a narrow opening in the middle. The house was empty. Pressing his head close to the glass he saw through a window at the back. Behind the house was another wall, perhaps eight feet tall, not visible from the street. Strung along its top was razor wire.

Shan hurried on, rounding the next corner, to the back of the compound, where the street was busier. He settled onto a park bench under a tree, studying the buildings at that end of the block. Here too were houses that appeared empty, that seemed to serve as outer barriers to the compound, but in the center of the block was a store of some kind, and across from that a small police station. Monks went in and out of the shop. He searched the faces of each, watching for Dakpo. His hand unconsciously pressed against his chest, touching the badge of Yuan Yi, the mandarin bandit.

“It takes up two city blocks,” a voice said over his shoulder. Meng was facing the compound as she spoke. “Nothing but old shops and businesses along the wall on the other side. All with signs saying they were closed for an urban renewal project. Except the paper is all yellowed and dried-up. Like it’s been there for years.”

“The main gate is the only entry,” Shan observed. “Everything else is locked up except for this one shop.”

Meng started across the street even before he rose from the bench.

The shop was dedicated to religious literature and memoirs of the Communist struggle. A poster of Mao’s calligraphy stood over a stand of little Buddhas holding the flag of the People’s Republic. They browsed as if they were a tourist couple, buying a package of the inexpensive prayer scarves that pilgrims left on shrines. At the rear of the store was a room identified by a sign as the library. Inside, a small display case held several artifacts from the original monastery and two larger cases commemorated the Chinese youth brigade that had captured it fifty years before. Their patriotic efforts, the display explained, had liberated more than two hundred monks. It was the uplifting explanation favored by propagandists. It generally meant the monks had been freed of their earthly existence.

A stiff matron sat at a desk at the head of a narrow corridor marked
PRIVATE ARCHIVES
, tapping the keys of one of the electronic mahjong games that had become so popular in China. During the ten minutes they watched, half a dozen men and women were admitted by the woman after showing identity cards in black leather cases. They were all Chinese, all with cool, arrogant faces.

Meng reached into her pocket and had taken two steps toward the desk when Shan grabbed her hand. “Our bus!” he chided, and pulled her out of the room.

“You fool!” Meng snapped as they reached the street. “I could get in. Those were Public Security identity cards. Somewhere down that corridor is a file with Jamyang’s name on it.”

“That game she had was for show. There was a keyboard on a shelf below the table top. She was recording every officer’s name as they went through. Five minutes after you walked down that hall Liang would have known you were here.”

The anger on Meng’s face changed to relief. “Ah yi!” she muttered. “Thank you.” She looked down and grinned. Shan was still gripping her hand. He flushed and pulled away.

They sat on the bench again. “There’s no need to go inside,” Meng ventured. “We know what they do.”

“Indoctrinate wayward monks.” The words were like acid on Shan’s tongue.

“They redirect those who have strayed from the ever-correct path of socialism.”

Shan would have been repulsed by Meng’s words were it not for the bitter tone with which she spoke them.

He watched a group of four men leave the shop, two Chinese and two older Tibetans in robes. “This is not about political calibration,” he observed. “There are camps that do that. This is different. This is for very special training.” Two limousines pulled up and deposited half a dozen Chinese men near the door.

“It’s like a private club,” Meng observed. As she spoke the group of four who had left the Institute walked by them. A gasp of surprise left Shan’s throat. He shot up and followed, getting closer. The robes of the two Tibetans were loosely belted. Hanging from the belts of each, like trappings of a uniform, were three identical items. A set of red rosary beads, a small ornate pen case, and a bronze wedge-shaped flint striker, identical to that used to kill the Lung boy.

*   *   *

The sun had been down for at an hour when Shan returned to the guesthouse. He had declined the evening meal, leaving Meng alone while he searched the shrines of the town for Dakpo. He climbed the wooden stairs slowly, weary not so much from physical exertion as despair. The monk could have gone on a pilgrimage, Meng had suggested. But not on a moment’s notice, Shan had explained, not in a rush to return by the full moon. Dakpo would not have had travel papers. More likely, he had been picked up, and was just a number in some distant detention center by now. The full moon. It was only a few days away now. Shan paused, then pulled out the note on which he had recorded the dates given to Lung Ma by Jamyang. One date, the date for the monk’s test run to Nepal, had already transpired. The last date was the date of the full moon.

He washed, then secured Yuan Yi’s badge in the bottom of his pack. He settled onto his bed but knew he could not sleep, so he rose and lifted the window, taking in the sounds of urban life. The low rumble of trucks rose from the highway half a mile away. Dogs barked. A child squealed with laughter in a nearby alley. Someone dumped bottles in a trash bin. The scent of fried onions and rice wafted in the night air. Shan was suddenly famished.

“I told them to save our dinner.”

Meng stood in the doorway that connected their rooms, holding two tin boxes. She handed Shan the still-warm containers and disappeared back into her room, returned with another chair and a small table that she set below the window. She laid out a towel for a tablecloth and topped it with a candle in a soda bottle. “There’s a brownout. The front desk was passing out candles.”

“You’ve been busy,” Shan said awkwardly as Meng struck a match and lit the candle.

“Not really. I shopped a little and fell asleep on my bed.”

Shan looked away, aware that he had been staring at her. She was not the austere woman he was accustomed to. Her hair hung loose and long over a blouse of red silk. As she opened his box of food and handed him a pair of chopsticks, she offered an uncertain smile. “We’re just two travelers tonight, experiencing a strange city together.”

Shan did not recognize the flicker of emotion he felt, was not sure why he stared after her when she stepped back into her room for a thermos of tea.

“There was no sign of Dakpo,” he said between mouthfuls of dumplings and fried vegetables.

Meng poured him a cup of tea. “I saw a park this evening where a boy was flying a kite with an old man,” she said in a quiet voice. “When I was young my uncle used to take me to a park like that every spring. We would leave very early, have to take several buses. I remember getting onto that last bus that took us to the park and how most of the passengers would be children with kites. The kite brigade my uncle called it. I thought it meant we were all going to be soldiers. But I didn’t want to be a soldier. Once, I saw a soldier with a kite in the park and I ran and hid because I thought he had come for me.”

Shan realized he had stopped eating.

“What is it?” Meng asked.

“I don’t…” Shan struggled for words. He stared at his food. “I don’t know how to do this. I’m sorry.”

“This? You don’t know how to eat your supper?”

“I mean you and me like this.”

“I seem to recall we have sat in more than one teahouse together.”

“Not like this. Not talking like a man and a woman.”

Meng’s face tightened. “You want me to leave?” she asked in a near whisper.

“No,” Shan said, too quickly. “I’m sorry. I’ve done too many things. I’ve seen too many things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In the gulag you learn to let scars grow over certain places in your heart.”

Meng was quiet for a long time. It was her turn to stare at her food. She bit her lip. “Then we will just practice for a while,” she said at last.

The melancholy in her eyes almost took Shan’s breath away.

They ate in silence.

“I had two camels when I was a boy,” he heard himself say in an oddly parched voice. He drank some tea and tried again. “Little wooden camels. They were my treasures. My uncle had been a trader in Beijing and gave them to me one New Year’s. We would light candles and he would speak long into the night about the way Beijing was when he lived there. In the winter there would be long caravans of camels, two humped camels, winding down the streets carrying huge baskets of coal. Sometimes he would go out and the alley he lived on would be entirely blocked by camels waiting to be unloaded. The handlers were all Mongolians, and in those moments he said it was like the great khans who built the city had never left. He expected to see Marco Polo at the next corner. I loved those stories, and I kept those camels even when we were sent to the communes for reeducation. My mother told me to pack my extra shoes but I packed my camels instead.”

The words began flowing freely then, and they spoke of tales of their childhood, of schooldays, of youthful visits to the sacred mountains of the east, of anywhere but where they were. It was nearly midnight when Meng packed up the empty dishes and returned them to her room. Shan went down the hall to the washroom, then stripped and lay under his sheet, watching the moon through the window.

She entered so quietly he was not aware of her until she stepped into a pool of moonlight ten feet from his bed. She was wearing only a sleeveless undershirt.

“What is it?” he asked, pulling the sheet up over his bare chest.

In reply she pulled the shirt over her head. “I’m not so old, Shan,” she said as she let the shirt drop on the floor.

“You—you should probably go.” He had trouble getting the words out.

“Do you have any idea, Comrade, how many years go by without my even meeting a man I respect enough?” She took a step closer.

“Surely not me,” Shan whispered. “I’m so much older.”

“You’re not so old.”

“I feel old,” he said. “That’s gone from my life.”

“You told me you couldn’t talk like a man with a woman. Then we talked for hours.”

“That was different.”

She was at the edge of his bed. “Then we will just practice for while,” she said, and lifted his covers.

“This isn’t the way we should…” The words died in his throat. Meng had her own way. His hand trembled as she raised it and placed it on her body.

Afterwards she lay in the round of his shoulder. “What happened to them?” she asked. “To those two wooden camels.”

“My mother got sick that first winter. We burned them to make her some tea.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The temple at the front of the Institute was already attracting a steady flow of visitors when Shan settled onto the stone flags of its floor the next morning. Tibetans and a few Chinese on the way to work in shops and offices were lighting sticks of incense and lowering themselves in front of altars beside a handful of monks who had been there when Shan arrived. Along a wall half a dozen other monks sat, some twirling handheld prayer wheels. A handful of Tibetans, in the rough clothing of farmers and herders, moved along the shrines that lined the opposite wall.

He glanced toward the door. Meng had been gone when he had awakened, had been all business when he had seen her briefly in the lobby of the guesthouse. She had greeted him with only an awkward smile and he had realized she was feeling the same uncertainty about the night before. He was stunned by the tenderness that had welled up within him, unbidden, unknown for so many years that he had thought he had lost all capacity for it. But as much as he was attracted to who she was, something inside could not help but be repulsed by what she was. He knew too that, for the knob inside her, he was a former convict, a stigma, a chain around her neck, a guarantee that she would never leave her exile within the Bureau. It was no doubt best for both of them to think of the night before as just a fleeting, intimate detour in the crooked paths that were their lives.