Mandarin Gate (9 page)

Day of blood. The terrible afternoon of murder and suicide would be marked indelibly in the mental calendars of the local people for years, maybe generations.

“I see everything but the numbers,” Chenmo said, forcing a smile. “What did he mean?”

Shan rolled up his sleeve and extended his forearm.

“Oh!” Chenmo said with surprise in her voice, then again “Oh,” more darkly, as she realized what they were. “Lokesh said you see secrets in deaths. Were you a murderer then?”

“No. Some ministers in Beijing felt safer if I was sent away. They didn’t understand the blessing they were bestowing on me by sending me to a prison full of lamas and monks. I didn’t either for the first few weeks. But eventually I was reincarnated.”

Chenmo nodded, as if she understood perfectly. “We know Uncle Lokesh but we have never seen you before.”

“I do not wish to disturb the tranquility of convents.” Lokesh would always be welcome in such places, he knew, but not necessarily a Chinese with a government job, however menial.

“Not a convent. A hermitage for nuns. Not a place for visitors.”

“But I was going to come. I have something to leave there.”

When Chenmo did not respond he pointed to his truck, parked near the ledge above them. She rose and warily followed him, staying several steps behind. Her uncertainty disappeared as he reached under the dashboard and pulled out the gau he had retrieved from the dead woman. Chenmo’s hand trembled as she accepted the silver amulet box, then she sobbed and clutched it tightly to her breast.

The gau seemed to release the tide of grief that had been swelling in the young novice. Tears began streaming down her cheeks. She let Shan lead her to a large flat boulder, where she sat weeping, staring at the gau in her hands.

After a few minutes he brought her a bottle of water from the truck and sat beside her as she drank.

“I am sorry,” Chenmo said. “I tried not to cry in front of the nuns.”

“I am sure they cried too, just in their own way,” Shan said.

The young woman offered a melancholy smile.

“Did you ever help Abbess Tomo in the old ruins?” he asked.

When she nodded, he continued. “There were two other people with her, two others who were killed with her in the ruins. A Chinese man with tattoos and a foreigner. Did you know them?”

“No Chinese came, not to the ruins.”

“But there was a foreigner.”

Chenmo stared at the gau as she spoke. “Mother Tomo said not to speak of it. They were secret, brought in by secret people.”

Shan weighed her words. There was more than one foreigner. “You mean the resistance. The purbas.” The local Tibetan underground had taken to calling themselves after the dagger used in Tibetan ritual.

“They don’t use any names. Dharamsala, is all. They say it like a password.” It was the town in northern India that was the capital of the Tibetan government in exile. “Sometimes they come across from India. They work in the shadows and go back in shadow.”

Shan had seen the secret ways. There were prayers brought from senior lamas and secret letters carried for families separated by the closing of the border. But there were also fuel trucks that mysteriously caught fire and pylons for remote power lines or phone towers that toppled in the night. Public Security might be obsessed with finding renegade monks but when they caught scent of such operatives they became rabid hounds. The most aggressive of the young resisters did not always adhere to the pacifist ways of their elders.

“She said think of them as phantoms, protector demons who can’t be seen. Is that what you are?”

Shan shrugged. “I am just a former convict, here for all to see.” As he digested her words, he grew more alarmed. “You mean the purbas brought in the Westerners?”

Chenmo stared at the old gau again, as if consulting it. “Jarman. Amerika,” she said, using the Tibetan terms for Germany and the United States. “They make films. They told us if they could film the restoration project and show the film in the West it would protect it, that Beijing couldn’t destroy it then.”

“Why you?”

“Because it was ours. I mean the hermitage was part of the convent once. We are where the spark is kept alive, after the convent was bombed.”

“And the foreigners were filming the restoration?”

“Yes. Using little cameras. Doing interviews.”

“You mean video cameras?”

Chenmo shrugged and made a circle with a thumb and a finger and held it to her eye. “Little cameras.” There were still many Tibetans, Shan reminded himself, who had little or no experience with modern technology, and little or no inclination to gain any.

“Were these foreigners staying at your hermitage?”

“These are dangerous times, the abbess would warn us. There are Chinese in the hills. Bonecatchers, and others who beat up farmers. We couldn’t risk bringing them to Thousand Steps. Only a few of us at the hermitage were to know. She said if the government discovered we were harboring illegal foreigners they would destroy the hermitage, ship us all to prison.” The northern townships of Lhadrung County were one of the regions of Tibet that were still off-limits to foreigners, because of their many prison camps.

Shan knew the young woman was still wary, that there were layers of secrets in places like hermitages, which had to be carefully peeled away one layer at a time. “Lokesh says we can learn much about what goes on inside Tibet by listening to those from outside. What were their names?”

“Rutger and Cora. They were never apart,” she murmured, then quickly looked up, frowning, as if she had not intended to reveal the names.

“Rutger,” Shan said. “Dark hair. Three or four inches taller than me. A square jaw.”

“If you have met him, why ask?”

“I only met him briefly,” Shan said. Without his face. Without his teeth. Without his life. “He is gone too, Chenmo, with the abbess.”

Chenmo replied with a somber nod. She knew the German was dead.

“I worry about the woman Cora. All alone now. Do you know where she is?”

“Pray her screaming in the night stops. Pray for the silent,” Chenmo replied. “Silence is how she must live now.”

Shan did not understand. “You mean she is at the hermitage?”

But Chenmo just pointed to a butterfly. Without another word she rose. Only after she had followed it, drifting away, did he grasp what she had told him. Cora and Rutger were never apart. Cora was having screaming nightmares. She had to stay silent to stay alive. The missing American woman had witnessed the murders.

CHAPTER FIVE

Months earlier Shan had seen the trucks transporting people and equipment into the low hills beyond the Chinese settlement. But in a land of many prisons and constant military operations you learned not to make inquiries about strange convoys and stayed away from the dust clouds that marked new construction. He remembered pulling over for such a convoy and grimly reading the insignia on the escorting vehicles. Bureau of Religious Affairs, Beijing’s favorite arm for turning Party dogma into ethnic propaganda. Public Security. The Institute for Tibetan Affairs, responsible for distributing the swelling ranks of Chinese immigrants and redistributing native Tibetans.

Clear Water Camp was one of the new relocation facilities, Lokesh had reported after he had encountered some of its residents digging for roots to eat. The government abhorred the nomads of the changtang, the high wilderness prairie that comprised much of central Tibet, for out in the vastness of the grasslands they were almost impossible to locate and even more difficult to control. They were, according to government fact-finding missions, hotbeds of Tibetan tradition. Settlements like Clear Water were built as transition communities, temporary stopping places where Tibetans were processed into lives that would be more aligned with the socialist cause.

As his truck crested the hill a gasp escaped Shan’s lips. He halted, hands on the wheel. He had traveled across the changtang, had befriended some of the joyful, free-spirited nomads whose clans had called that wild land their home for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. The nomads had been corralled like sheep in a pen. Scores of small identical square buildings lay in rows before him, all with the same corrugated metal roofs and metal doors, the same single window and steel pipe chimney.

As he left his truck by the entrance a plump Chinese man bounded out of a long cinder block structure that apparently served as the camp’s office.

He greeted Shan as if he were a long-awaited guest. “Comrade! Welcome to Clear Water Resettlement Camp!” He paused, glancing at Shan’s truck, parked far enough way so that its faded government insignia was visible, but not the words underneath. “How may I assist?”

“Just a quick look on my own,” Shan ventured, then turned to the man with a stern air. “How many do you account for here?”

“We accommodate one hundred and twenty-seven citizens, with room for dozens more. One of the great successes of redistribution.”

“Successes?” Shan asked.

“Of course. We are able to administer medical care, provide dry sleeping quarters, provide two meals a day. Schoolteachers may arrive any day. None of which they had before. Sixty percent have already taken Chinese names, qualifying them for electrical feeds, so electrical distribution into households of reformed nomads is at unprecedented levels. Nearly half are taking the Chinese history modules sent by Beijing. Very encouraging statistics. We are passing out new bedding,” he added, pointing to a pile of tattered sheets by the door of his office. “Historic breakthroughs.”

Shan saw the empty stares of the Tibetan men and women who sat before the little huts. The encouraging statistics.

“Where do they work?”

“No need. They are provided for. Employment will be found for them in a few months, after they graduate from my finishing school,” the manager explained, grinning at his own wit. “Some have found a few sheep to tend to. More like pets.” The man gestured toward the administration building, the stuccoed wall of which was adorned with a mural of ebullient factory workers. “I have the numbers if you wish to review them. We are ahead of our quotas. Best performance in the entire prefecture.”

Shan fought a shudder. “I think I will just look for myself,” he said.

“Let me just lock up,” the manager said.

“Alone.”

“I don’t usually let—”

“You would rather have me tell Colonel Tan you impeded my report?”

The man shrank back and shot a nervous glance up the road before retreating into his building.

None of the displaced shepherds would look at Shan as he walked down the first of the narrow streets. The little prefabricated structures, each the size of a small garage, had metal frames into which sheets of plywood had been inserted. Only a handful of the metal chimney pipes showed any smoke. Several of the inhabitants were cooking at small braziers by their doors. Electric wires dangled low between buildings. A woman carrying towels herded three children from a long squat structure at the end of the block, apparently the community washhouse. Half a dozen other women waited with buckets in a line at a spigot that was spitting up brown water.

Shan tried to look into the faces of the shepherds. Most turned their backs on him. An old man, sitting on a bench made of cinder blocks and planks, looked up from the block of wood he was carving. Shan sat beside him, offering the man a roll of hard candy he found in his pocket. The man accepted the token with a nod and returned to his work. He was whittling the figure of a sheep.

“Tell me, Grandfather, what became of your flocks?”

The man rubbed his stubble of whiskers before replying. “They waited until we had the flocks all gathered. We were preparing for our clan’s lambing festival. Two sets of livestock trucks came that day. One set took the sheep, one took the shepherds. At some camps they just machine-gunned the animals, even the dogs. My granddaughter managed to get her puppy on the truck. The next day a soldier killed it with the butt of his gun. He told her it was just the right size for the army stew pot.”

Shan glanced back at the administration building. The manager was watching him through a crack in the door. “I am sorry.”

The man nodded again.

Shan studied the man’s leathery, wrinkled face as he whittled. He was old, in his eighties or even nineties. “I traveled in the changtang once,” Shan said. “For as far as I could see it was a sea of grass, rolling like waves in the wind. I don’t think I ever felt so free.”

“Some in our clan ran away that day. I was their headman. Rapeche they call me. They need me. I am worthless here. The soil of our lands flows in my blood. I tried to go back. Last month I started walking down the road but a day later the knobs picked me up.” The old shepherd paused, then shrugged. “They gave us papers that say we have to stay in this county, unless we get their signature on a pass. Except they never give their signature.”

They were in a prison without bars. Shan looked up and down the track between the houses. “Where are the young men and women?”

“The Chinese from the relocation office told all the families that their young had to serve the people. Sent to factories in China. I said to them we were people too, and they laughed. My granddaughter is in Guangdong now. She writes us once a month. She makes socks for sale in America. Works twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. Sleeps in a dormitory with two hundred other girls. She says she found an old temple and borrows a bicycle to ride there on her day off. She lights incense for us.”

Two young boys ran past, kicking a tin can, then stopped near the spigot. One of the women had fallen to her knees, crying, as another kicked the spigot.

The headman frowned. “The fools who built this place knew nothing about campsites. No protection from the wind. Hardly any water. They drilled half a dozen wells and they all went dry but that one. Clear Water, my ass.” He shrugged again. “They say they will leave a tank truck in the parking lot.”

“I am looking for a man named Jigten. He has a limp.”

“Which is why they wouldn’t take him for the factories,” Rapeche said. “His mother hardly has the strength to get out of bed. Her lungs are rattling. He does things to help her that she would never approve of, if she knew.” He shrugged once more and kept whittling. “We do what we have to do to survive.”