Mandarin Gate (23 page)

Shan looked uncertainly around the table. All of those present were older than him, some of them by decades. He reminded himself that the emigrants forced to move to the village had all been retired professors. “Society?” he asked.

“We call ourselves the Vermilion Society after the color of the ink reserved for the old imperial courts. Keeping old ways alive. Professor Wu,” he said, indicating the bald man, “prints up Sung poems and leaves them on doorsteps. Professor Chou,” he said, with a gesture to the woman, “organized a production of an old play from the Ming dynasty. We’d sweep old graves if there were any here. We try to remember things from old China and record them. There’re so few good history books left, and it’s been decades since a true history of China was written. There are wonderful things from the dynasties, things that need to be remembered.”

“The truest history,” interjected Professor Wu, “is that built on a thousand tales of the common man.”

From the kitchen came the sound of low coughing. Sansan stood in the shadows. Shan offered a hesitant nod to Wu. “In the People’s Republic that can be dangerous ground.”

The old professor’s eyes gleamed. “Don’t you know we are all here because we are dangerous people? What are they going to do to us? Exile us to Tibet?” Another raspy laugh escaped his throat.

Despite his pain, Shan couldn’t suppress the grin that tugged at his mouth.

The woman at the table held up a large sheet of paper bearing small sketches, the first of which was a bird with three legs, a hen in a circle, and a dragon.

Shan cocked his head. “Symbols of the emperor.”

Professor Chou’s face lit with satisfaction. “Yuan said you knew your history! We are making a collaborative painting of an emperor’s robe, then we hope to make an exact replica if we can find the silk. But we can’t agree.” She pointed to two more symbols, one of three dots connected by lines, one of seven connected dots. “Professor Yuan says there are three and I say seven.”

There was something inside Shan that rejoiced at the absurdity of their sitting here in the remote exile community of Tibet debating imperial customs. He paused, venturing into a musty corridor of his memory. “Professor Yuan is from Manchuria, home of the Qing dynasty,” he quietly explained. “The Ming emperors used a full seven stars to show the constellation of the Great Bear, though they called it the Bushel then. But when Qing emperors arrived from the north they abbreviated it to three. Apologies, Hsien Sheng,” he said to Yuan with a slight bow of his head. “Elder born,” it meant, a homage paid to teachers.

Yuan silently smiled, and urged Shan to drink his wine. The woman clapped her hands in triumph.

“You’ll have to decide about the beads always worn with such a robe,” Shan continued after draining his glass. “They were traditionally red coral beads but late in his reign the Qianlong emperor declared that white Manchurian pearls would henceforth be worn.”

The group gave a collective murmur of respect, then quickly followed with a energetic discussion of court ritual. When Shan volunteered that for years he had spent much of his spare time in Beijing exploring every nook of the Forbidden City, they filled his wine cup again and with great enthusiasm fired new queries at him about the proper order of ranks in imperial processions, ceremonies for erecting new temples, archery competitions, and a dozen other aspects of imperial life.

As Sansan brought in fresh tea the talk turned to ancient poetry and the old tales of heroes. “My favorite of all was Sung Chiang,” she offered.

Professor Chou, who explained she was a retired professor of literature, nodded. “
The Water Margin,
” she added, referring to the Ming dynasty novel about the rebel Sung Chiang, who forayed out of his marshland lair to defend peasants against injustice.

“History and heroes repeat themselves,” Professor Yuan observed.

Shan suddenly realized that everyone was looking at him, grinning. He flushed with color, then, mumbling an excuse, stood and fled out the kitchen door.

He sat on a bench set against the rear wall of the house, watching the moon rise over parched, spindly trees. His mind wandered, toward the mountains, toward the little cottage where he prayed Lokesh and Cora Michener were safely hiding.

“The most enduring myths are all based on fact.”

He started at the sudden words and looked up to see the professor’s daughter standing beside the bench.

Sansan continued without waiting for his reply. “My father says if you look hard enough in Tibet you can see the myths come to life.”

Shan said nothing, just moved to make room for her as she sat beside him.

“Robin Hood, bandit of the forest,” she said. “He was the Western equivalent of Sung Chiang, bandit of the marshes. They dared to defy the government, they brought justice when no one else knew how to find it.”

“I am no Sung Chiang,” Shan whispered.

Sansan seemed not to hear him. “In the city there is so much noise and clutter. Everything moves so quickly. It is easy to miss the important things. Here we have learned to cultivate the quiet, as the old Confucians would say, so there is always time for the important things. Here people speak of deities like they are next-door neighbors. They talk of myths as if they were just family histories.”

Shan turned to look at the girl. She had been the ringleader of the dissidents, the reason all the families had been exiled to Tibet. She looked like a young schoolgirl but spoke with the weary wisdom of one far older.

She met his gaze. “You make the people of this valley believe in heroes.”

“You confuse me with someone else.”

Sansan shrugged. “Then let’s just say you inspire them to action. You make me worry for my father.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He says we can’t stand by and do nothing.” She looked up at the moon with an odd longing. “We have very little money. He’s been eating only rice and putting money aside to buy books and ink and brushes for his calligraphy. He offered some of it, enough for a dozen books, to that lame shepherd, Jigten.”

A chill ran down Shan’s back. “For what purpose?”

“To translate a little journal Jamyang left with my father for safekeeping. It was like a trade. Jamyang kept our artifacts safe and we kept his writings safe. But it’s almost all in Tibetan. Jamyang was a complex man. My father says those murders must have had something to do with Jamyang, that he knows you must think so too.” When she turned to Shan there was pleading in her eyes. “He says the journal was meant for Tibetans but if they act on it they will be punished. He says he must understand it, to use the answers it provides. We will not sit back and do nothing when there are wrongs being committed among us. He says you have shown us.”

Shan sighed. “I am an example for no one.” His throat was dry, his voice hoarse. “He can’t…” His words drifted away as he recalled the tranquil bedroom he had been in. “He has too much to lose.”

“We have nothing to lose. The government liberated us by sending us here.”

Shan’s heart seemed to sag. “Surely he must understand. He has you. You have each other. You have a home.” He could not bear the thought of being responsible for the professor and his daughter being separated and sent into the gulag.

In the silence that followed he could hear the voices from inside, softly reading old verses by candlelight. He did not even realize the girl had left the bench until she stepped back out of the door, holding her laptop computer. She gestured him toward the little toolshed at the back of the yard.

Inside, she unfolded the computer on the workbench. The screen burst to life and she began tapping on the keyboard. A moment later, a scanned document appeared, in Jamyang’s familiar handwriting.

“Two dozen pages in all,” the woman said, showing him how to scan through the pages. “Some pinned together, some pages of different sizes, like he was just writing on whatever paper was available.”

It was not really a journal, Shan saw as he skimmed through the pages, but notes, random entries of life in the valley, of work on his shrine and the deities they uncovered with their cleaning brushes. One page was just a list of Tibetan gods and their protector demons. He pointed to a smudge of color in the top-left corner of the page. “What is this?”

Sansan ran the cursor over the page and tapped another key, magnifying the image. A Tibetan chorten was revealed in pale red ink, with a heavy hammer imposed over it.

A grim silence descended over them.

Shan rubbed the ache at his forehead. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he whispered uneasily “He was using whatever paper he could find.”

“A sacred Tibetan sign under a symbol of the Communist Party. Where would he find such paper?”

Shan did not answer. “What did Jamyang say when he gave this to your father?” he asked.

“Only that it was important. Or more exactly,” she said, as if correcting herself, “that one day it might become important. Later he told me I should scan it into my computer, just in case. I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except—”

Shan completed her sentence. “Except he died.” He scrolled to the final page. It was a list of artifacts. A ritual dagger with a ruby in its pommel. A bronze trumpet. Three ritual masks with a detailed description of the demons they represented. He knew them. They were from the convent ruins, the very artifacts he and Lokesh had shown to Jamyang, artifacts Jamyang had helped clean and hide.

He slowly searched through the other pages. There were lists of ceremonies conducted by monks and nuns in the valley, with dates for each, as well as lists of shrines, most of them publicly known but some secret. There was a sketch of four young Tibetans blowing a long duncheng horn, with the caption “Sound of Freedom.” One page, obviously written in ink and pencil at different times, listed the names of monks and lamas under the heading “Chegar gompa.” Years had been written by many of the names, some as far back as three decades, some as recent as the year before. At the bottom of the page were three names with a circle around them. Abbot Norbu and his two attendants Dakpo and Trinle.

One day these pages would become important. “What was it your father and Jamyang spoke of when they were together?” he asked.

“History. Literature. Jamyang would translate some of the old Tibetan poems into Chinese. Sometimes they would speak of their own histories. My father’s teaching career. How we were accused and sent here. Jamyang liked to speak of his boyhood on a farm in the mountains north of here.”

“Did he ever speak of his recent past?”

“Not that I ever heard. We always understood he was a lama, a senior teacher. So he would have started as a monk at an early age, my father said.” She hesitated. “There was one night when a truck filled with Tibetans bound for one of the camps passed by the little grove of trees where we sat. Jamyang was sitting with us outside. He grew very sad. After a long silence he asked my father if he thought a man would be punished in this life for sins of his past life. My father just laughed and said Jamyang was confusing him for another lama.”

Shan paused at the last page. It read like a prayer, or a eulogy. “So young to pass,” it said, “so confused a spirit that is brought up with violence. You grew up in forests of bamboo and die among trees of flags. One hand on the knife, the other searching for your heart. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see.” Shan read it again, and again, each time growing more disturbed. It was about the Lung boy, whose body had scared Jamyang so.
Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see.
Jamyang had known the killer was a monk.

They were not the last words on the page. At the very bottom, in a different ink, written later, were four more words. “Kaliyuga,” it said. “It has arrived.” The grief that surged within Shan as he read them was as real as that he had felt when he had held the lama’s dead body.
Kaliyuga
was the Tibetan word for the end of time. Jamyang had known that at least the end of his time had come.

“When was it?” he asked after a long moment, “when did he bring this to you?”

“Two or three weeks ago. He always came in the night. He brought incense sometimes.”

“Incense?”

Sansan gave a sad smile. “He knew I was often sick. Sometimes I cough and can’t stop for several minutes. He brought things, some from the old convent. I said we couldn’t take such things, but he said they were safer with us than in the ruins, that I needed them more.”

“Sansan, I don’t understand.”

She glanced at the door of the little shed, then stepped to the side wall and began lifting away planks. A double wall had been erected, a second row of planks that would be enough for a casual searcher to miss the narrow space they concealed. “Father at first kept his special things here, before entrusting them to Jamyang. The first time Jamyang gave us artifacts we just set them on the little shelf inside the compartment. Later he said he had a better idea. He worked in here alone one night, then brought me in holding a candle, and had me sit on the old rug.” She indicated a tattered piece of carpet, that looked like an artifact itself, then pulled away the final planks and held up her light.

Jamyang had built Sansan a shrine. On the lower shelf were offering bowls, several deity figures, and an incense burner. Above them was a faded, but still elegant thangka, a painting of the lapis god Menlha, the deity invoked for healing. In his left hand the blue deity held a bowl of nectar, the universal cure.

“He knew I was having a hard time getting my medicine,” Sansan whispered. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “He said this belonged to his uncle, who was a healer and who was known for making special cures out of gemstones and herbs. He said he wished he had such skills but that he did at least know no medicine would work unless the spirit was ready to accept it. He said I should light incense here each day and gaze at the lapis god. He said not to be shy about breathing in the incense, that in smoke and mist were where humans and god meet, that if I could awake the god then some of the nectar would enter my body.”

They stood silently in front of the altar. Shan realized he was meditating not so much on the deity as on Jamyang. The only time he had ever heard of the lama speaking of family was to this quiet, spirited Chinese girl. The words he had used echoed of regret. Shan looked back at the workbench. “He told you to scan that journal? He used those words?”