Beautiful Ghosts (2 page)

Built by ghosts. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. In a way the man was right. For the monks of Yerpa, the hidden hermitage where Shan and Lokesh lived, had built the small elegant structure by moonlight, with one monk always praying as the others constructed the tiered foundation and its bell-shaped spire. It was to be a monument to the ruined gompa, a sign that the deities had not entirely forgotten the local people.

“Ghosts and murderers, and Liya makes me bring my family here.”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Lokesh whispered, an unusual edge of emotion in his voice. Shan knew how it pained his old friend to see the people of the hills react to them with such suspicion and distrust. Lokesh closed his eyes a moment as if to calm himself. They were on the brink of disaster, Shan realized. A few more words from the herder to the other Tibetans and they would all flee, some perhaps spreading word of killers, but others of illegal monks, which would bring soldiers into the mountains.

Lokesh pulled out the silver amulet box, the
gau,
he wore around his neck and carefully opened it. It was an extraordinary thing to do with a stranger, and the action quieted the man. Inside the gau, under several small folded pieces of paper which Lokesh emptied into his hand, was a tiny photograph of a bald monk wearing spectacles, his face serene but laughter in his eyes. “That monk who chants,” Lokesh explained, “his name is Surya. He comes from high in the mountains, not the world below. And inside his gau he also carries a picture of the Dalai Lama.” He pointed with a gnarled finger to the photograph. “Have you truly forgotten what today is?”

The man’s brow furrowed and he pressed his palm tightly against his temple, as if in sudden pain. He stared at Lokesh, then Surya, and the fear in his eyes slowly waned, replaced by a sad confusion. He reached into his shirt and extracted a prayer box that hung around his own neck. “I have one of those. My father wore it, and his father.” He stared at his small, elegant silver gau. “But it’s empty,” he added in a haunting tone. “When I was a boy my teacher burned what was inside.” The words seemed to remind him of the dangers in the hills, and he glanced back at Atso’s body. “His murderer is out there, stalking old Tibetans. You must flee, too. In town they say there’s a bounty on someone’s head. Soldiers are searching. We have to…” His voice faded as his gaze returned to Lokesh.

“What old Tibetans?” Shan asked in alarm. “Who has a bounty…” His own words drifted away as he glanced back at Lokesh.

With a fingernail the old Tibetan was slowly prying the photograph from his gau. As the herder watched in disbelief Lokesh placed the photo in the man’s own prayer box. “We will ask Surya to write a prayer for it, to keep by your heart,” he said.

The herder’s jaw opened and shut several times as if was struggling to find words. “You truly mean it, that he is a real monk?” Emotion flooded the man’s face. Confusion, but also gratitude, then awe and pain. “My name is Jara,” the man whispered, not taking his eyes off Surya now. “In all my life I have never seen a monk, except the ones who visit from Lhasa once a year with the Bureau of Religious Affairs. They make speeches, not prayers. The children never…” The words choked in his throat.

“It’s too dangerous for a real monk,” he continued in an urgent voice. “If he’s a real monk, here, then he’s an outlaw. Those soldiers will take him to that prison in the valley. He must cover his robe. Please, for all of us, cover his robe. You have no idea how terrible that prison is.”

Lokesh grinned and rolled up his sleeve. The herder stared in confusion, until his gaze fell upon the long line of numbers tattooed on the old Tibetan’s forearm.

“You were there?” the herder asked with an anguished groan. “You were a prisoner and still you risk doing this?”

Lokesh pointed to an old cracked metal brazier by the chorten, a ceremonial
samkang,
where a small juniper fire burned. “The fragrant smoke attracts the deities. They will protect us. You’ll see.”

Shan glanced back toward Liya, still perched high on the hill. Not everyone relied on the deities for protection. She was watching the west, toward the garrison at Lhadrung Valley, and surely would have called out if she had seen soldiers.

“That song he makes,” Jara said, gesturing to Surya. “Is that what monks do?”

Lokesh shrugged. “It’s part of the celebration. He has found his serenity and is rejoicing,” he added as he exchanged an uncertain glance with Shan. The day before at Yerpa they had found Surya destroying a painting of a god he had worked on for weeks. He had not acknowledged them when they had asked why, only silently slashed at the cloth, had not spoken to anyone since. But now the chanting appeared to have brought back the joyful Surya they both knew.

The words seemed to heighten Jara’s anxiety. He nervously looked back toward the slopes. “Tibetans don’t celebrate in Lhadrung, unless it is a Chinese holiday. This is Colonel Tan’s county,” he added with a shudder, referring to the iron-fisted officer who ran the county, one of the few still under military rule.

“No. You are at Zhoka now,” Lokesh said, as if the windswept bowl constituted a different place, a sanctuary not part of Tan’s county. “There is so much to be thankful for.”

Jara surveyed the ruined gompa, without a single building left intact, and the frightened, impoverished group of Tibetans in the courtyard, then looked at Lokesh as if the old man were crazy. “I know what day it is,” he said, whispering again. “A man with a tea shop in town was arrested for marking this day on the calendar in his window.”

“Then call it something else. A festival, because the monks have returned.”

Jara swept his arm toward the ruins that filled the barren landscape. “From where? From the dead? In the country I live in monks don’t return unless the Bureau of Religious Affairs says so.”

“Then call it a festival for the choice.”

“Choice?”

Lokesh gazed somberly at Jara, then at his gau. “From this day forward you can choose the place you live in.”

The herder gave a dry, bitter laugh. As he looked at the old Tibetan, Lokesh’s features became distant, as if looking past Jara’s eyes, into another part of him. The herder soberly returned the stare then tentatively raised his hand as though to touch the taller Tibetan’s white stubbled jaw, the way the others, disbelieving, had first touched the chorten.

“You will change forever the country you live in,” Lokesh said softly, “by taking back a prayer in your gau.” As he spoke another figure in a robe appeared, a tall, graceful man with a face worn smooth as a cobblestone. Gendun, the head of Yerpa, the hidden hermitage that was home to Surya and Shan and Lokesh, looked serenely at Jara, then gazed with a sad smile at Atso’s body.
“Lha gyal lo,”
he said in a quiet, reverent tone toward the dead man. Victory to the gods.

A strange excitement seemed to flash in Jara’s eyes at the sight of the lama. No one could look into Gendun’s open, serene face, and suspect subterfuge. As the lama stepped back toward the courtyard Jara slowly followed, gesturing toward the body again. “There is a still a killer out there,” he said in a tentative voice, as if arguing with himself.

“Not here. Not today,” Lokesh said for the second time that hour.

To Shan’s surprise, Lokesh did not follow as Jara joined his wife and children in the courtyard, but motioned Shan back toward the shadows. When they stopped a few feet from Atso’s body Lokesh turned toward the courtyard and planted his feet apart like a sentry. Shan studied him in momentary confusion, then realized that none of the other Tibetans could see Shan or Atso.

He pushed back the broad-brimmed hat he wore then knelt by the dead man, working quickly, compiling a mental list of his discoveries. One of Atso’s hands was wrapped around a gau that hung on a worn silver chain, the fingers of the other hand entwined about a
mala,
a strand of prayer beads. The back of the hand with the prayer box was split open, a jagged wound that could have come from fending off a club or a rifle butt. The palms of both hands were scratched and abraided, the ends of his fingernails split and broken. At his waist a small plastic bottle half filled with water hung from a piece of rope. Pulling back the blanket, Shan exposed the left foot, revealing a tattered leather boot with a two-inch-wide band of heavy jute cord wrapped around the sole.

In his trouser pockets Atso carried two small pouches, one of freshly picked flower heads, the other of chips of juniper wood. A small pocket sewn inside his felt vest held a tightly folded paper, a printed announcement about a free children’s health exam in the valley. On the back of the paper was inscribed the
mani
mantra, the prayer for compassion, in tiny cramped writing, row after row of miniscule Tibetan figures. Shan stared at the old man’s face then looked back at the paper. The mantra had been written at least a thousand times, then the paper rolled and folded as if Atso had intended to leave it somewhere very small.

He lifted the ruined statue, the little silver Tara. It had a patina of great age, except for a patch of bright metal at one shoulder where the devout had rubbed it for good luck. Shan held it close, studying the dented, imploded head, holding it at various angles, examining the long gash along the goddess’s spine, Jara’s haunting declaration echoing in his head.
They kill for a word in these hills.
The goddess was hollow, and empty inside. Often the Tibetans inserted small rolled-up prayers inside such statues.

Shan looked back at Lokesh. Instead of beginning the death rites his old friend had invited him to study Atso’s body—even though the hill people would not be happy that Shan had touched the body, even though they both knew the monks would resist any effort by Shan to investigate the murder for, to them, the only investigations that mattered were those of the spirit. He lowered the goddess to the blanket then stepped to Lokesh’s side. “What is it you know?” he asked. “What is it you’re not telling me?” He extended the paper. “What had so worried Atso he would labor for a thousand mantras?”

Lokesh studied the paper forlornly, as if reading every mantra. “I met him only once, when I was gathering berries in the mountains above here two weeks ago,” he said, nodding toward the snowcapped peaks to the east. “He asked what it was we were doing at Zhoka. When I told him it was a secret, that he should come today to find out, he grew angry, then sad. He said we didn’t understand, that Zhoka is a place of strange and powerful things that must be left alone. He said that the most dangerous thing about Zhoka is not understanding what it does to people.”

“Are you saying he died because of something here?” Shan asked.

Lokesh turned back to look at the corpse. “Somewhere gone is what he seeks,” he said quietly.

Shan studied his friend. The old Tibetans had a way of mixing tenses, of slipping over time, ignoring spans of decades, even centuries, when speaking, in order to express essential truths. As he was about to press him, a figure appeared in the shadows behind Atso. A young woman, dressed in black, her hair in a long braid down her back, knelt beside the body. She returned the broken statue to its bag without examining it, then pulled at the blanket, straightening it, patting it around his body, as if putting a loved one to bed. As she did so Shan glimpsed Atso’s right boot. It, too, had a wrapping of jute, identical to that of the left boot. But the boot was not so tattered as the other, did not need the jute to bind it together.

“Liya,” Shan said, “where have you seen the statue before?”

When she looked up Liya’s eyes were full of tears. “When I was a little girl Atso carried me on his shoulders so the sheep would not run over me. I haven’t seen him for ten years, not since his wife died and he moved into that hut.”

“Where were they taking him?” Shan asked, not understanding why the Tibetans seemed to be avoiding his questions.

“There were strangers in the mountains last night when I was riding, between here and the valley.” Anguish rose in Liya’s eyes. “I dismounted, thinking I could hide. But suddenly they aimed lights at me and began shouting. They said I was not allowed to go to the east, as if they owned the land around Zhoka. I thought they were herders passing through, worried about pasturelands. I thought the monks would be happy to have as many as possible here today. When I said there was to be festival here, with monks, two people began speaking in English, very excited. A man and a woman. A man put a light on my face, then he apologized in Chinese and they all backed away. It made no sense. What would a Westerner know about Zhoka? What Chinese even would remember the place?” Liya scrubbed at one of her eyes. “I should have known better. I should have warned people.”

“The work they did here was famous all over Tibet, famous even with the gods,” a deep soft voice suddenly interjected. Surya was a few steps behind Shan, standing at what had been the entrance to a small building. He was intensely studying a piece of rock in his hand. Not a rock, Shan saw, but a piece of plaster, part of a painting. The front half of a deer was plainly visible, a familiar image from a scene of Buddha’s first sermon. “Here,” the tall, thin monk said, speaking to the deer in a voice that was strangely apologetic, “here you must be nailed to the earth.”

As Shan approached him Surya stepped into the ruined building, still seeming unaware of any of them, like the day before.

In the silence that followed the monk’s odd words Shan surveyed the rubble in which Surya stood, a sudden, terrible sense of premonition making him desperate to understand. Part of one wall remained erect, the rest was nothing but stones, shards of plaster, and charred debris. Surya took another step, then seemed to weaken, falling to his knees. Lokesh rushed to his side then froze as Surya extended his long fingers toward the sky, opening and closing them repeatedly, as if trying to gesture something down from the heavens.

After a moment the monk reached toward a pile of rubble a few feet away. Shan stepped uncertainly toward the pile, a heap of burnt timbers and broken roof tiles. Liya stepped forward to help and in less than a minute they had uncovered a small cracked, wooden chest with two drawers, eight inches high, nearly twice as long. Surya’s eyes gleamed with excitement as Shan handed it to him, as if the monk, who like the rest of them was a stranger to the ruins, knew the chest. The brittle wooden front broke as the monk pulled the bottom drawer. Surya reached inside and extracted a handful of long graceful paintbrushes, gripping them tightly, holding them toward the sky. He closed his eyes as if praying a moment, then began passing out the brushes, one to each of those present. “Today will be the end of all things,” he declared in a dry, strangely joyful whisper, then smiled as he handed the last brush to Shan. “Blessed Atso. Blessed protector!” he cried.