Mandarin Gate (32 page)

“No,” she shot back. “Never on our rug.”

As she bent to pour them tea, Shan strained to make sense of her words. Lokesh would have known how to speak with the woman. His gaze drifted back to the tiger rug and his recollection stirred. Once, Lokesh had told him, tiger skins had been reserved for revered lamas, who sat on them while teaching. “Jamyang taught me things from the old ways,” Shan ventured.

The woman ignored him, gesturing to a string of white squares hanging from a rafter. “There’s cheese,” she stated flatly. Such dried cheese was a staple of many farming households.

“He taught me to look beneath the appearance of people.”

The woman gave a snort of derision. “He taught death and betrayal. He taught us about damned appearances well enough.”

“Jamyang is dead,” Shan declared.

The woman hesitated only a moment. “There’s yogurt in a jar in the stream out back.”

“I need to know about him. About what happened to him when he was young.”

She eyed the teacups as if trying to decide if she had fulfilled her obligation, then fixed him with a hard stare. “What happened to him happened to us all.”

Meng tugged on Shan’s sleeve, trying to pull him toward the door.

Shan drained his teacup, then pushed the empty cup toward the kettle.

The woman frowned. “If you desire more tea, you will need to get me some more dung,” she said icily.

The silence hung heavily about them. Shan was increasingly certain the old woman held a vital piece of the puzzle that was Jamyang, and just as certain she would not share it with two Chinese strangers.

Suddenly a shadow filled the doorway. The woman’s eyes went round and with a gasp leaned forward, nearly touching her forehead to the floor.

Dakpo was in the door, his face clenched in pain, blood seeping from the bandage on his head.

“These two were sent by the deities,” the monk said. He was breathing heavily. “They saved me. Shan is a friend of the old lamas.” He clutched his rib cage and sank to his knees. “They are truth seekers,” he moaned, and collapsed in the doorway.

The old woman moved with surprising speed, springing up so quickly she was able to catch Dakpo’s head before it hit the stone flags of the floor. For a moment she silently held the monk as if embracing a lost family member.

“His name is Dakpo,” Shan explained. “He is from Lhadrung County, from Chegar gompa. He has cracked ribs. He was attacked in Chamdo. We could not leave him there.”

It was Meng who broke the silence. “I will get more dung,” she said, and disappeared out the door.

Shan and the woman worked wordlessly, unrolling the pallet and laying Dakpo on it as Meng coaxed the brazier into a bright fire. While Shan wiped at the monk’s wounds the woman made more tea then put on a pot for soup, which she asked Meng to watch over as she disappeared out the back door. When she returned she carried a wooden box of salves and ointments. A rolled-up piece of cloth was in one hand, a large black dog was at her heels. As Shan relieved her of the box the dog growled. Shan backed away. It was the same bearlike creature that had bit him. The woman leaned over the animal, whispering into his ear. The dog seemed to frown, then turned to examine Dakpo, and began sniffing the monk’s body with slow deliberation. Wherever he paused the woman applied salve.

“I am Leshe,” the woman declared when she and the dog were done. She unrolled the cloth she had carried in and hung it over Dakpo. It was a small painting of a familiar blue deity, a well-worn thangka that could have been centuries old.

“
Tadyatha om bekhandzye,
” Shan intoned.

He saw the look of disbelief on Leshe’s face as he continued the invocation of the Medicine Buddha.

The tension seemed to fall away from the old woman. She nodded, and joined him in the mantra.

When they had finished Shan looked up to see that Jigten had joined them and was quietly helping Meng prepare their meal. As they ate Shan explained how he had met Jamyang, and described his sudden death.

Leshe did not respond until she had lit incense at the little altar and murmured prayers to its bronze Buddha. “We had beautiful farms once,” she finally began, “my family and that of Jamyang’s father. For as long as memory could reach each generation gave a son who became a great lama. We had many happy years. Even after the Chinese entered Lhasa it was years before they found us. When they did it was just a lot of Chinese teenagers in military trucks. They put all the fathers and mothers on trial, accusing them of being landowners. The Chinese said that was a crime against the people. In some places landowners just lost their lands and became laborers, but here our people were proud. They declared the trial a sham. They said they were free Tibetans who could not be judged by Chinese children. The Chinese laughed and said see if our bullets are a sham. They executed them all. Jamyang’s parents. My husband. I was sick in bed or they would have killed me too.

“Jamyang came to live with me then. For a few years we were happy enough. My brother Ugen was a lama at a gompa near Lhasa. When he visited he sat on the tiger skin, as generations before had done, and Jamyang seemed entranced as Ugen spoke of the old ways and of how the Dalai Lama would come back one day. All Jamyang ever wanted to do was be a lama like his uncle. But his Chinese teachers said he was too bright to stay here. They sent him away, gave him a Chinese name. After college he visited, very excited. They were going to let him become a monk after all, to work in the Bureau of Religious Affairs.”

Leshe sipped her tea and offered a bitter smile. “I told him to be a monk you have to go to a monastery, have to study many years. He said he would be going to monasteries, to explain about the new order of things. I said he had become a puppet of those who had killed his own parents and he yelled at me, said I was just a backward old hag who knew nothing of the way of the world.

“My brother visited him, tried to get him to leave the Bureau, to go to his gompa and become a real monk. A few weeks later my brother was thrown into prison, one of those gulag camps. They said he was a traitor to China. The Motherland they called it,” she added in a melancholy tone.

“It was nearly three years before Jamyang visited again. He was troubled. He kept staring at the tiger rug. He couldn’t sleep. I found him up in one of the pastures. We sat in the moonlight and he confessed his shame. Not long after his last visit he had been offered a big promotion, but they had required him to prove his loyalty. So he had turned in his uncle. Jamyang had assumed he would be sent to some reeducation camp for a few months at most. He had only just found out that Ugen had been sentenced to twenty years hard labor.” Leshe looked down, wiping at a tear. “He begged my forgiveness but I would not give it to him.

“It was many years before I heard from him again. He had been made administrator of this, director of that, always wearing a robe, always paid by the Chinese. He told me he was corresponding with Ugen, that his uncle was doing well, that his uncle had forgiven him and had become a model prisoner. Jamyang would send me a letter every few weeks then, telling me how he was living in this monastery or that, learning more of the scriptures the way Ugen had taught him from the tiger rug, telling me he was getting reports that Ugen was doing well, that he was being rehabilitated, whatever that meant. I never wrote back. He began sending letters to the headman of the village to make sure I was still alive. He would send gifts for the headman to give to me. Little Chinese cakes and tea. I told the headman to keep the tea. I fed the cakes to the pigs.”

Leshe paused and looked at Dakpo. Their patient was awake, and listening intently. Before she continued she braced a cushion behind him so he could sit and drink tea. “Then a few months ago my nephew appeared in my doorway. He wore a lama’s robe over a business suit and tie. He said he was traveling to a new assignment and had asked the driver to turn off the highway. A big black car was waiting for him in the village.

“I gave him lunch. We walked up in the pastures. He had a big secret to tell me. He said he had arranged for Ugen to receive light trusty duties two years before, told me how he had been negotiating for his release, that if he performed well in his new assignment his uncle would finally come home. He showed me letters from Ugen, in Chinese, that proved he was in good health and contented. He grew upset with me, asked me why I did not feel joy from the news. I took him inside to the altar,” she said with a nod toward the bronze Buddha. “I told him I would sit in front of the Buddha so he would know my words to be true. I explained to him that Ugen did not speak Chinese, did not write Chinese. I lifted the gau, that one you see there on the altar, and told him to study it.

“He stared as if he had seen a ghost. I told him the truth then, for he knew that gau had been in the family for centuries, that it had been Ugen’s. It had been sent home to me six years before when Ugen killed himself in prison.

“He stared and stared at the gau, then finally pressed it to his head and wept. I gave him tea. He would not speak with me. He just held the gau and stared at it. His hands trembled like those of an old man.

“Then the car horn started calling him. The other one, his companion, grew impatient, and was standing at the driver’s window, pressing the horn.”

“The other one?” Dakpo asked in a whisper.

“Another man in a robe over a suit, very tall, carrying what looked like a silver bell. They were being driven like they were Chinese royalty.”

An anguished moan escaped Dakpo’s throat. He sagged and Leshe helped him lie back on the pallet.

Shan studied Dakpo in confusion, then asked Jigten to bring the truck up. The young monk needed to return to his bed in Chegar gompa, where he could be properly looked after.

“Your foot,” Leshe said to Shan. “Pick up your trouser leg.”

The Tibetan woman murmured something and the big dog stepped forward. Shan forced himself not to react as the animal sniffed at Shan’s ankle. “He apologizes for biting you,” Leshe said, then made a clucking sound as she studied the bite. “That old fool put on honey, didn’t he?” She made a gesture and the mastiff licked away the honey. She lifted one of her wooden tubes and began applying a salve to the wound. The dog watched with bright, intelligent eyes. “He only bites Chinese,” Leshe explained in a matter-of-fact voice, then paused. “He appeared as a pup six years ago, waiting at my door.”

Shan offered an awkward grin and touched the dog’s head as it turned to contemplate him with its big, moist eyes. “I didn’t hear his name.”

The old woman cast an impatient glance at Shan, as if he hadn’t been listening. “It’s Ugen, of course.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Brilliant claws of gold reached across the dusk sky, as if a dragon were rising out of the sacred mountain. Shan sat outside the shepherd’s hut and arranged sticks on the ground. One six-inch-long stick with two shorter sticks underneath, over another long stick and another short pair, so that they made a square of a solid line, a broken line, a solid line, and another broken line. It was a tetragram, used to identify passages of the
Tao te Ching,
which he had memorized with his father as a boy. With slow, deliberate movements he disassembled the tetragram and built it again, dismantled and built it again, like a meditation practice. It invoked passage eleven, called “Using What Is Not.” “Clay is shaped to form a vessel,” it said. “What is not there makes the vessel useful. Take advantage of what is there by making use of what is not.”

It wasn’t simply that Shan had once misunderstood Jamyang. He was misunderstanding him again and again. First, Shan had known him as only a solitary, reverent hermit. Then he had grown to consider him as a lama in some mysterious exile, or a pilgrim doing penance. But he had also been a bureaucrat with a robe, an official who was fluent with computers. One of the agents trained to consume Tibet from the inside out. He had been all and none of those things. Shan had assumed his movements in his last few days had been actions to implement some plan, but they had all been reactions. He had missed the empty place, missed the phantom that gave everything meaning.

The realization had come slowly, a small dark thing gnawing at his gut since leaving Jamyang’s village. Some of the old lamas fervently believed that souls made sounds, that old hermits who suddenly found realization howled long syllables that could shake mountains. For Shan, the sound had come first, Dakpo’s anguished gasp before Jamyang’s aunt. He understood now that the monk’s reaction had changed everything. Dakpo had suddenly known, and collapsed, when Leshe had spoken of a man carrying a silver bell.

Shan had missed the phantom, the shadow that was always a step ahead, never there. It was time to use what was not there.

He rose and found the American by the little fire they had made to cook their evening meal. “I understand your need for silence, Cora,” he began. “But it must end. I want to help you but now you have to help me.”

The American woman struggled with her reply. There were still days, Lokesh said, when she did not speak at all. “There is no way out for me,” she said at last. “There is no one I can trust except Lokesh and Chenmo. And we can barely speak with each other,” she added with a bitter smile.

“And me, Cora. We can talk together. Together we are going to stop the murderer. Together we will get you home.”

“I should have been dead. I know that old Tibetans talk about not arguing with your fate, about embracing it. I was supposed to die that day.”

“No. You were supposed to live. You were supposed to become the way we stop the killer, the way word reaches the outside.”

“I’m always so afraid.”

“There are many things I have learned in Tibet,” Shan said to the American. “One is that your life isn’t about what others do to you, it is about what you do to yourself.”

“The killer wants me dead, doesn’t he?”

“I won’t lie to you. But Lokesh and his friends have taught me that you can’t let your decisions be determined by the cruelty of others.”

“I don’t know who the killer was. Just a monk.”