Soul of the Fire (11 page)

Shan cautiously stepped forward, then sat down beside him and rolled up his sleeve, exposing his prisoner tattoo. “You mistake me for someone else.” He bowed reverently to the Buddha on the altar of worn planks. To one side were the seven offering bowls of Tibetan tradition. To the other were butter lamps, several little
tsa tsa
images of saints, and two framed photos—one of the Dalai Lama and one of a monk who appeared to be in his thirties—taken in front of what looked like a monastery gate.

Shan said nothing more, but simply joined in the old man's mantra. It was an invocation of protector deities, one that Shan had learned in a frigid prison barracks years earlier. A quarter hour or more passed before the old man quieted. “Few in this village even know those words,” he observed to Shan, curiosity in his voice, then he turned toward a shadowed doorway. “He is one of those Chinese Commissioners.”

Shan heard a fearful groan and a sturdy-looking woman, several years younger than the man, rushed out to stand beside the janitor, as if he needed protection.

“He's Chinese, and not Chinese,” the old man said, as if to reassure her.

“I have brought something of yours,” Shan said, then extracted the key ring and extended it toward the janitor.

The woman's hand tightly grabbed that of the old man's, who did not accept the keys. “A lofty official such as yourself no doubt is entitled to open whatever locks interest him,” the janitor rejoined.

The words stung Shan.

“I was negligent in allowing them to be taken,” the Tibetan added.

“The Commission sought to have a reformed criminal in its ranks,” Shan explained. “After Commissioner Xie died, someone thought I was the next best reformed criminal. But when Public Security came to me and my friend Lokesh, we were sure they had come to imprison us again.”

The woman finally spoke. “Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“Where we live, in Lhadrung County, we seek out old religious artifacts and hide them from the government.”

The woman stepped forward and clamped a hand over Shan's tattooed numbers. “Recite them without looking at them.”

Shan complied, speaking toward the Buddha. “My name is Shan Tao Yun. I spent five years in a Lhadrung death camp. My friend Lokesh is being beaten in Longtou Prison to guarantee my good behavior.” He looked into the woman's eyes. “But he would be ashamed if I behaved.”

The woman studied him intensely, still not convinced, then sighed. “We have tea,” she declared, reluctantly surrendering to the steadfast Tibetan tradition of hospitality.

They drank with polite, restrained conversation in a kitchen alcove lined with faded
thangkas,
hanging paintings of Buddhist deities. Shan commented on the beauty of the artwork, but his hosts seemed not to listen.

“What camp in Lhadrung?” the old man asked.

“The 404th People's Construction Brigade.”

The man's gaze softened. “They call it the reincarnation mill.”

It was a very Tibetan way of describing what was one of the worst death camps in all of China. Shan had been sent there to die. He
did
die, in a very real way—had lain broken, sapped of all strength, with only a tiny smoldering ember left of his spirit. But the old lamas and monks had reincarnated him. “I had the honor of meeting many great teachers there, and of being with several when they departed this world. Later I met herders in the mountains who said they often saw rainbows rising up over the 404th.”

The old man reacted with a sad, wise smile. When they died, enlightened spirits were said to ascend on rainbows to the higher plains.

His hosts spoke more easily now. The man's name was Tserung, his wife's was Dolma. They had been married for nearly forty years, Dolma explained, and had lived in Yamdrok since their release from the top of the hill.

“You were both prisoners in Longtou?” Shan asked.

Dolma, then Tserung, exposed their forearms to show their own tattooed rows of numbers.

“I had nearly attained the highest rank in my monastery,” Tserung explained. “I took my final examinations at an early age. I was expected to become abbot, like the three generations in my family before me. Dolma was deputy to her abbess.”

“You knew each other before you were arrested?”

“No,” Tserung said as his leathery hand closed around that of his wife. “It was just one of the ways they had to break our vows.”

“Our destiny,” Dolma offered.

Shan studied the two Tibetans, chewing on their words, then understood with a pang. One of the ways Beijing had broken monks and nuns was forcing them to copulate with each other.

“One year on their chairman's birthday, they released us and gave us a certificate saying we were married,” Dolma recounted. “It took a long time, but eventually we came to grasp the blessing bestowed on us.”

“We had a son,” Tserung inserted, pride flickering on his leathery face.

Shan looked back at the photo of the monk on the altar. He was scared to ask about the handsome young man.

Tserung seemed to understand the question in his eyes. “We learned about Chinese questions in prison. We taught him how to speak to those people from Religious Affairs. He got his license.”

“Do you see him often?”

“His monastery was Kirti,” Dolma said, as if it explained much.

“I am sorry,” Shan said. Kirti, a center for Tibetan protests, had been subject to repeated and violent crackdowns by the government. Through the years many of its monks had been imprisoned. Kirti was a name that appeared frequently in Commission files, for it also contributed more monks to the list of self-immolations than any other single location.

“Two years ago, he left on a pilgrimage,” Tserung said, “and he never came back. We pray for him each day.”

Dolma produced a bowl of fresh apricots.

“There is a large stone building on the other side of the mountain,” Shan said as he accepted one of the fruits. “What is it used for?”

Shan did not miss the worried glance exchanged by his hosts.

“It was built as a stable,” Tserung explained. “Most of the land for many miles was once devoted to the upkeep of the abbey. Novice monks would sometimes go there and recite their sutras to the livestock for practice.”

“What is it used for now? Public Security drives in and out.”

Dolma poured Shan more tea without replying.

“I imagine those sutras still echo there,” Tserung said as he gave an exaggerated stretch. “I worked all night,” he added, and gestured toward a back room of the little house.

“I will not keep you from your rest,” Shan said, then stood and stepped toward the front door as Tserung nodded his farewell and disappeared into the dark chamber.

Dolma put a hand on Shan's shoulder. “Not yet. We should chat with the gods.”

The woman's weathered face was lined with wrinkles, but she had the air of an energetic young novice as she led Shan to the first of the
thangkas
and settled onto the tattered carpet arranged before the images.
“Om tare tuttare tue svaha,”
she began. She was invoking Tara, the mother protector of Tibet, who was depicted in the painting. Shan sat beside her and joined the chant. After several minutes, she rose and seemed to wait for Shan to choose a deity.

With a deliberate air, he stepped to the image of Menlha, dropped to the floor, and invoked the Medicine Buddha. “Look to the patient in Zhongje with the terrible burns.”

They began the mantra and when Dolma hesitated, Shan inserted the name of Kai. She followed his lead. “Public Security says he is the one who burned on the slope,” Shan said when they were finished. “But he is not. You and I know the man on that hill died.” Dolma's grip on her beads tightened. “Tibetans came disguised as herders to watch that old stable,” Shan continued. “The next day a man burned there. Those who run the Commission will say those Tibetans arranged the immolation. But I don't think so.”

“A man. You didn't say a monk. Everyone saw a monk.”

“They saw what the killers intended. This was not a suicide immolation. There was no audience to hear his protest. There was blood. There was,” he added after a moment, “no poem.”

Dolma went still. “This has nothing to do with Yamdrok.”

“The Tibetans on that hill didn't come from Zhongje, or the prison. Nor from the Lhasa highway. They came from here. I think the man who burned was Administrator Deng of the Commission.”

A startled cry escaped the woman's throat, and her hand shot to her mouth. “Surely you don't know that,” she said.

“Do I have proof? No. Do I believe it? Yes.”

She was silent a long time, then recited a few more mantras before responding. “Did you see the little stone chapel below the orchard?” she asked. “That chapel has stood there for hundred of years. Long before Zhongje and the prison. Before the old abbey itself. The gods have roots there. They protect Yamdrok.”

“Nothing will protect Yamdrok if it incurs the wrath of Deputy Secretary Pao.”

The name chilled the room.

“By now he knows it was Deng.”

“No one has come to interrogate us.”

“No one has come yet. Officially, they would like to forget it, to avoid further attention by the Commission. Unofficially, they are furious. Pao will eventually learn about the Tibetans on that ridge the day before.”

Dolma spoke toward the deity on the painting. “All the prison workers were forced to go listen to a speech he gave last year. He is very young. Too young, I think.”

Shan turned to the woman with new interest. “You work at the prison?”

“Tserung and I are both janitors—he in Zhongje, and I in Longtou. They don't trust the prisoners to clean the administrative areas.”

Shan spoke with a new, urgent tone. “Do you know of my friend Lokesh? He was taken there several days ago.”

“There was a man with grey hair and a thin beard brought in without going through the registration procedures, just taken directly to the stone cells they use for solitary punishment.”

“He is like family to me. How can I reach him?”

“The stone cells are not just solitary. They are for special prisoners. Prisoners who need confession, either theirs or someone else's. Not all leave those cells alive.” She turned back to the deity and began invoking his healing presence again, but then inserted Lokesh's name.

A shiver ran down Shan's back. Dolma did not know Lokesh, but she knew the fate of those in the stone cells.

Shan rose, leaving Dolma chanting to the Medicine Buddha. He circled the chamber, slowing as he passed the back room. It was dark, but the light from the entry lit a solitary
thangka
on the wall inside. The fierce blue goddess Bhimadevi glowed in the darkness. Inside the chamber, in the heart of the house, was the she-wolf form of Tara, the savage protectress of faithful Tibetans and sacred books.

The sight unsettled Shan, and as he pushed the outside gate shut, he gazed uneasily at the house. He had learned much about deities from Lokesh and the lamas of their prison. The image of the she-wolf was almost never seen in modern Tibet, and not merely because the new generation was forgetting the older gods. In old Tibet, such deities would have been reserved for dark, hidden chapels tended to only by the most experienced lamas. In their world, the two gentle old Tibetans were secretly harboring a savage beast.

He paused, seeing the tops of the orchard trees, and found himself climbing toward them.

The little chapel described by Dolma was a tiny gem of a building surrounded by the fragrant juniper trees favored by the spirits. The lower branches of the apricot trees adjacent to the junipers drooped with rocks tied to them, one of the old ways of deflecting demons. The squat, sturdy structure itself was obviously well cared for, but he had the sense that it was one of the oldest buildings he had ever seen in Tibet. The abbey must have been at least five hundred years old, and Dolma had said the chapel predated the abbey. The end of each roof beam was carved with the head of a different protector deity. One wall supported a framework of bronze prayer wheels, each cylinder the breadth of three hands. The entryway was flanked by stone carvings of gods, though so eroded that only the graceful hands pressed together in blessing were still plainly visible. He stepped into the entry to see a simple altar of carved wood, with the traditional flickering offering lamps. An old
thangka
of Tara hung over the altar, but no other silk hanging was needed, for the walls were painted, every inch covered with elaborate images of deities, demons, and auspicious signs. He yearned to examine every one, and knew that if Lokesh were with him, they would be here for hours. But the presence of the deities today somehow brought an odd shame.

He retreated, vowing to return with Lokesh when their nightmare was over, then quickly explored the rest of the village. He found what he was looking for near its northern edge.
PEOPLE'S HEALTH CLINIC,
the bilingual sign on the run-down wooden building read, though the Chinese portion was obscured with dried mud.

Shan paced around the building. Its roof was in bad need of repair. A broken window was boarded over. The only sign of activity was a donkey cart tied to a stunted tree beside the building, its load of straw oddly dripping water. He tried the front door and found it locked.

“Only three days a week.”

He spun about to face a teenaged Tibetan girl, her hair in long braids interlaced with beads.

“Is there a doctor?”

The words gave her pause. She studied Shan, then glanced at the cart before speaking. “Not for years. An old healer comes now. For Chinese, there is a clinic in their new town.” She paused. “My parents won't let me near there. The Chinese say they built the town to help improve our lives. But if that is so, why build a wall around it?” When Shan offered no reply, she shrugged. “I don't think your friend is hurt that bad. Not yet.”