Mandarin Gate (34 page)

The color was slowly draining from Meng’s face. “I don’t believe you, Shan. You mistrust everything. You mistrust yourself. I understand you had a terrible experience. It was all so unjust. But you see poison everywhere now. I tried to give you a gift and you hated me for it. Like I had something to do with what happens to these poor Tibetans.”

He returned her stare without speaking. When she broke away, tears were in her eyes.

“Check the records,” he said. “Speak to people at headquarters. The arrival of Major Liang would not have been missed. There’s no doubt a house for government visitors. They would keep records of who stays overnight. If you can’t find the records talk to the housekeepers.”

She turned away from him. He waited several minutes, then began walking down the road.

He had gone nearly a mile when he heard the wheels on the gravel behind him. The truck eased by and stopped.

She began shouting before her feet hit the ground. “You think I am just another damned puppet! You think I don’t care about anything!” As she pulled her uniform cap from her head hairpins went flying, so that her long tresses whipped about in the wind. She shook the cap at him. “I am tired of your damned self-righteousness! You think no one can see the truth unless they’ve suffered for it!” She threw her cap on the ground and stomped it into the dust.

Her words came out in sobs now “I am no puppet, Shan Tao Yun! I hate the way Tibetans look at me! I am no animal! I am real! I am—” Tears were streaming down her face. “I just want…” Her words broke into sobs.

He laid a finger along his lips, then put his arms around her. She clung to him as if she were drowning. From somewhere in the hills behind them came the deep-throated call of a prayer horn.

*   *   *

Dawn was seeping over the mountains as Shan crept cautiously along the path behind the gompa. When he had taken Dakpo back to Chegar the monk had asked to be left with Patrul, saying he did not wish to disturb the gompa at such a late hour. Only later he realized it was more likely that Dakpo feared going back into the monastery. He could not shake the feeling that he owed the monk more, and could not forget he had only two days until the full moon.

The former abbot was sitting before his simple altar in the big barn when Shan approached. Shan was standing ten feet away when the blind man raised a hand over his shoulder and gestured for him to come forward and sit.

“It was good what you did for Dakpo,” Patrul said. “You have a habit of rescuing creatures in distress.”

“With Dakpo, Rinpoche, I am not sure if I rescued him or pulled him deeper into the mud.”

“He is young but he has learned enough to know there is no purity without impurity.”

“I would like to find a way to speak with him. Did he find his way back to the gompa?”

The old teacher shook his head. “He fears what he would do to it.”

Shan turned for a moment to look at the storerooms along the corridor of the long barn, then weighed Patrul’s words. “What he might do to it?”

“I think you understand how the truth is the most painful weapon of all. The truth you armed him with would devastate the monks.”

Shan gazed up at the Buddha on the makeshift altar. He was the blind man here. He knew how much the monks of the struggling gompa revered their abbot. Norbu was their hero, their savior. Norbu had resurrected Patrul out of the oblivion of the gulag. To tell them the truth would be telling them they had been used, that they were a sham, that they were puppets of Public Security.

When he turned back to Patrul the big shaggy mastiff was by the old lama, gazing at Shan. “You were serving ten strings, Rinpoche,” Shan said after a long silence. “No one gets early release when they’ve opposed loyalty oaths. Trinle said it was because you went blind.”

Patrul offered a sad grin. “He’s a good boy. Always looks for the best answer, if not the true one. He forgets I was nearly blind when they arrested me.”

“Bringing back the silver bell to Chegar would have made Norbu welcome but arranging for you to be at his side made him a hero.”

“They called it a humanitarian release,” Patrul said with a bitter laugh. There was pain in the teacher’s voice. He had already realized that he too had been a puppet.

“But still you are here,” Shan replied. “Perhaps there was the hand of a deity in this.”

“No matter what happens my Chegar suffers.”

“I don’t think so. You are its protector. You have always been its protector. No matter what happens there will be no abbot from Beijing here for many months, probably a year or more.”

“A gompa needs an abbot.”

“They have one, the best they ever could hope for. In a way he never left.”

“I am old and blind.”

“You are wise and shrewd. If Tibet can have a shadow government, then surely Chegar can have a shadow abbot.”

“
Lha gyal lo.
” The words came in a whisper from the shadows.

Shan lifted a butter lamp and stepped to the storage room behind them, the door to which was open. Dakpo sat propped up on a bed of straw. He bent over the monk, feeling his forehead, then his pulse.

“I am well enough, Shan,” the monk said bravely. “A few cracked ribs are worth the cure you have given us. But I worry,” he added. “Trinle came last night to say Norbu has the monks stirred up, talking about their duty to the Dalai Lama. I can’t confront him. I am not sure I would be believed. And now the full moon comes. The tentacles will reach across to Dharamsala. I can’t.…” The monk’s voice faded away.

“I understand, Dakpo. It is nearly over. You need to continue being his student so he does not suspect. Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed.”

Shan grinned. “Exactly.”

Suddenly the calm of the dawn was disturbed by the ringing of a bell. It was not a call to worship. Shan stepped to the shadows of the entry to see monks emerging into the courtyard of the gompa, trotting toward the row of bicycles along one wall. He called out a hurried farewell to Patrul and Dakpo, then ran out the back of the barn.

Minutes later he was standing in the back of his truck, watching the monks through his binoculars. They made a thin line of maroon along the flat road, an arrow aimed down the valley. Shan followed the path of the arrow, trying to understand its target. It could be the convent ruins. It could be Baiyun. It could be some pilgrim’s path selected for clearing.

By the time he drove back onto the main road he saw that others were traveling toward the center of the valley. Figures on bicycles, on tractors and donkeys, were converging not on the ruins or the town but on a crossroads that marked the intersection of the main road with a dirt track that led to farms in the hills. He sped up as he reached the pavement, soon passing the monks, noting several familiar faces, including Norbu near the front.

A small crowd was already at the intersection as Shan coasted to a stop in front of a newly erected mileage sign. His heart sank as he read it. The sign was only in Chinese. A farmer was standing on the seat of his tractor haranguing the assembled Tibetans about how he didn’t live on a Chinese road, he lived on a Tibetan road.

“Just because you call a leopard a mule doesn’t make him one!” a man brandishing a scythe shouted.

More vehicles arrived, mostly bicycles and tractors, some pulling wagons with families. A cargo truck approached, blaring its horn at the crowd that blocked its passage. An aged tractor pulling a cart with goats and several more farmers arrived. Shan opened the door of his truck, well aware of the angry stares aimed at him.

The first monks who appeared were younger ones, who began to fuel the anger with calls for Tibetans to remember what it meant to be Tibetan. Sirens rose in the distance. One of the figures with the goats emerged and Shan looked in alarm at the man.

“Yuan!” he called out. The professor and his daughter with three other Baiyun exiles were threading their way through the crowd.

“You should go,” Shan said. “These people are furious.”

“I promised the goats a trip in the country,” Yuan said with a spark in his eyes. Shan looked back at the tractor, the beat-up old community vehicle kept in the Baiyun market ground, then saw the defiant glint in Yuan’s eyes. They were more than five miles from the town. The professor had not come in reaction to the disturbance, he had set out before it had started. “You knew about this?”

“Jigten drove past the police crew that was installing this last night. Each one that’s been installed in the past three months has brought a demonstration by Tibetans. The valley doesn’t need more disturbances.”

“Police crew? Not a road crew. Are you sure he said that?”

Yuan offered a pointed nod as Norbu mounted one of the wagons.

“We must not give them cause to make more arrests,” the abbot implored the Tibetans. The police cars were visible now, an Armed Police troop truck led by two grey vehicles. The driver of the cargo truck, now stopped, got out and stood on the hood. It was one of Lung’s men.

While the attention of the Tibetans was fixed on Norbu, Yuan moved through the throng, his daughter close behind, holding a small pail. The professor extracted a brush from his jacket, dipped it in the pail and began writing with yellow paint on the blank back of the sign, carefully consulting a piece of paper held up by his daughter. The letters were in Tibetan and though his hand was unsteady the letters were legible.

Shan gasped. A Tibetan boy gave a startled laugh. At the end of the word Yuan painted an arrow, pointing south.

As Norbu climbed down he called on the Tibetans to rally behind him, so he could be their shield against the police, now climbing out of their vehicles. But another Tibetan, and another, stepped behind the sign to look at Yuan’s handiwork. Each gazed for a moment then laughed.
“Lha gyal lo,”
a woman called, smiling at Yuan. Shan’s alarm changed to fear as a bullhorn crackled.

“Unless you have a permit to assemble,” came Liang’s voice, “you are committing a crime. Disperse now or you will be arrested.” Shan studied the major, and the uneasy way the police looked at him. There was no official reason the special officer from outside the district should be supervising what for them was a routine security detail.

Norbu’s voice at first rang out clearly. “We are but farmers going about our business,” he called back. “The police have nothing to fear from us. We seek only your respect as the original inhabitants of this valley.”

A woman beside Shan groaned. “No, he mustn’t,” she cried. “Not our blessed abbot. We can’t let them throw another abbot in prison.”

Norbu spoke again but the growing murmur of the Tibetans who hurried to look at the back of the sign swelled over the abbot’s words. Yuan stepped back so all could see his work.

Dharamsala,
he had written by the arrow, first in Tibetan then in Chinese. He had pointed the way to the capital of the free Tibetans in India.

An old Tibetan woman grabbed Yuan as he tried to go to Shan and embraced him. Shan could not hear Liang’s words but the anger in his tone was unmistakable. Four policemen with truncheons left the major’s side. A Tibetan farmer grabbed Sansan and pulled her into the crowd. The Tibetans were in trouble enough, but if Liang grasped what had happened his venom would be directed at the exiles.

Shan eased back into his truck. He turned on the ignition and pressed the accelerator so that the old engine sputtered loudly, then he fumbled with the shifter and clutch, noisily grinding the gears. Those around the truck cleared away. Liang roared out angry orders. Truncheons were being raised. Shan caught Norbu’s gaze and held it with cool intensity. Then he shoved the truck into gear and shot forward.

The sign exploded as he hit it, sending splinters into the air. The post was thick and well set. It bent his bumper and knocked the radiator ajar before snapping. He climbed out, staring in mock confusion at the steam rising from his damaged truck, casting furtive glances to confirm that the Tibetans, now satisfied, were leaving.

Norbu studied Shan a moment uncertainly, then trotted to his side. “We pray you were not hurt, Comrade,” the abbot offered loudly, then turned to the police. “Once again the gods have intervened for Tibetans,” he called out defiantly.

Liang’s eyes stabbed at Shan. After Tan’s intervention he knew he could not arrest Shan, not with so many witnesses, not for what could be characterized as an accident. He raised his bullhorn to his lips, turning to point at Norbu.

“Chegar monastery is behind this!” the major shouted, then in an uncertain tone he spoke again. “Those who refuse the embrace of the Motherland must suffer the consequences!” It was the sound of a seasoned actor trying to salvage a disrupted script.

*   *   *

For the first time the little café in Baiyun had a light, almost cheerful atmosphere. Tables had been carried outside into the golden afternoon sun.

Shan had looked for Professor Yuan at his house but found only his daughter working at her computer on the kitchen table. “It was a reckless thing you did this morning,” he told Sansan.

“I tried to talk him out of it. He had found a quote from Mao that he decided to embrace. ‘The only way to have a true government of the people is to engage in constant revolution.’ When Jigten came to pick up medicine and mentioned the sign, the Vermilion Society was here. My father suggested it as a joke but one of them said he knew where to find paint. They were like boys planning an adventure. They are still celebrating at the teahouse. I’ll go with you.”

To Shan’s surprise there were Tibetans sitting with the usual patrons at the little café. They cast uncertain glances about the street. One of the professors was trying to cajole the Tibetan waitress into joining him for a game of checkers. Shan found a seat at a rear table and tea was brought to him. It was a rare hour of camaraderie between Tibetan and Chinese. They had enjoyed the tiniest of victories over the government and though it would not last it was worth savoring. But for Shan the taste was sour.

He had managed to drive his crippled truck to Lung’s garage but the repairs would take more than a day. Lokesh knew enough about his unpredictable life in the valley not to worry if he did not reach their little hut that night. But tomorrow was Sunday, the first Sunday of the month. For the past week the voice inside his head had been growing louder and more insistent.
Ko is waiting for you. Ko needs you. He can’t think you’ve given up on him. Nothing must prevent you from seeing your son
.