The Skull Mantra (3 page)

“Shan Tao Yun,” Trinle observed quietly, “was reduced. He will return to his bunk tomorrow.”

“Reduced?” the
khampa
sneered.

“A punishment,” Trinle replied. “No one explained the system?”

“They pushed me out of the truck and just gave me a shovel.”

Trinle nodded to one of the young monks sitting nearby, a man with one milky eye who instantly dropped his prayer beads and moved to the
khampa'
s feet.

“Break one of the warden's rules,” the man explained, “and he sends you a clean shirt. You appear before him. If you are lucky, you are reduced. The immediate elimination of everything that provides comfort except the clothes on your back. The first night is spent outside, in the center of
the assembly square. If it is winter you will leave your body that night.”

In Shan's three years he had seen six of them, carried away like altar statues, frozen in the lotus position, clutching their makeshift beads.

“If it is not winter, the next day you may return to the shelter of your hut. The next your boots are returned. Then your coat. Next your food cup. Then the blanket, the pallet, and finally the bed.”

“You said that's the lucky. What about the others?”

The young priest suppressed a shudder. “The warden sends them to Colonel Tan.”

“The famous Colonel Tan,” the
khampa
muttered, then abruptly looked up. “Why a clean shirt?”

“The warden is a fastidious man.” The priest looked back to Trinle as though uncertain what more to say. “Sometimes those who go are sent to a new place.”

The
khampa
snorted as he recognized the hidden meaning of the priest's words, then warily circled Shan. “He's a spy. I can smell it.”

Trinle sighed and picked up the
khampa
's kit, moving it to the empty bunk by the door. “This one belonged to an old man from Shigatse. It was Shan who got him out.”

“I figured he took four.”

“No. Released. He was called Lokesh. He had been a tax collector in the Dalai Lama's government. Thirty-five years, then suddenly they call his name and open the gate.”

“You said this rice-eater got him out.”

“Shan wrote some words of power on a banner,” Choje interjected with a slow nod.

The
khampa
studied Shan with a gaping mouth. “So you're some kind of sorcerer?” The venom was still in his eyes. “Gonna work some magic on me too, shaman?”

Shan did not look up. He watched Choje's hands now. The evening liturgy would soon begin.

Trinle turned with a sad smile. “For a sorcerer,” he sighed, “our Shan hauls rocks well.”

The
khampa
muttered under his breath, and threw his boot to the bunk by the door. He was conceding not for Shan, but for the priests. To be certain, he turned to Shan.
“Fuck your mother,” he grunted. When no one took any notice, a gleam entered his eyes. He moved to the bare planks of Shan's bunk, untied the string at his waist, and urinated on the boards.

No one spoke.

Choje slowly rose and began cleaning the bunk with his own blanket.

The sheen of victory left the
khampa
's face. He cursed under his breath, then, nudging Choje aside, pulled off his shirt and finished the job.

There had been another
khampa
in their hut two years earlier, a tiny, middle-aged herder jailed for failing to register with one of the agricultural cooperatives. Alone for nearly fifteen years after a patrol picked up his family, he had finally wandered into a valley town after his dog died. He had been the closest thing to a caged animal Shan had ever seen, always pacing back and forth in the hut like a bear behind bars. When looking at Shan his face had been like a small fist clenched in fury.

But the little
khampa
had loved Choje like a father. When one of the officers, known as Lieutenant Stick for his affinity for the baton, had taken his stick to Choje for spilling a barrow load, the
khampa
had leapt on the Stick's back, pounding him, screaming profanity. The Stick had laughed and pretended not to notice. A week later, released from the stable with a limp from something they did to his knee, the
khampa
had ripped strips from his blanket and begun sewing pockets to the inside of his shirt. Trinle and others had told him that even if he stored up enough food in his new pockets for a flight across the mountains, it was futile to consider escape.

One morning, when he had finished his pockets, he asked Choje for a special blessing. At their mountain worksite he began filling the pockets with rocks. He kept working, singing an old herder's song, until Lieutenant Stick moved near the edge of the cliff. Then, without a second's hesitation, the
khampa
had charged, hurling himself at the Stick, locking his arms and legs around the officer, using the extra weight to convey them both over the cliff.

Suddenly the night bell rang. The single naked bulb that
lit the room was extinguished. No talking was permitted now. Slowly, like a chorus of crickets claiming die night, the liquid rattle of rosaries filled the hut.

One of the young monks stealthfully moved to keep watch by the door. From a hiding place under a loose board Trinle produced two candles and lit them, placing them at either end of the rectangle of chalk. A third was placed in front of Choje. The flame was too dim even to reach the
kenpo's
face. His hands appeared in the light, and began the evening teaching. It was a prison ritual, with no words and no music, one of the many that had evolved since Buddhist monks began filling Chinese prisons four decades earlier.

First came the offerings to the invisible altar. Choje's palms were pressed together facing outward, his index fingers curled under his thumbs. It was the sign for
argham,
water for the face. Many of the
mudra,
the hand symbols used to focus inner power, still eluded Shan, but Trinle had taught him the offering signs. The bottom two fingers of Choje's disembodied hands withdrew into the palms and the hands aimed downward.
Padyam.
Water for the feet. Slowly, gracefully, Choje deftly moved his hands to offer incense, perfume, and food. Finally he closed his fists together, the thumbs extended upward like wicks from a bowl of butter. It was
aloke.
Lamps.

From outside a long moan of pain punctuated the silence. A monk in the next hut was dying of some internal ailment.

Choje's hands gestured toward the invisible circle of worshipers, asking what they brought for the glory of the inner deity. A pair of thumbless hands appeared in the light, the index finger of each hand touching at the tip, the other fingers folded. A tiny murmur of approval moved through the room. It was the golden fish, an offering for good fortune. New hands appeared, each after sufficient time to silently recite the dedication prayer that accompanied the prior offering. The conch shell, the treasure flask, the coiled knot, the lotus flower. It was Shan's turn. He hesitated, then extended his left index finger upward and covered it with his right hand flattened. The white umbrella, another prayer for good fortune.

The room filled with the tiny, remarkable sound, as if of
rustling feathers, that had become a fixture of Shan's nights, the sound of a dozen men silently mouthing mantras. Choje's hands returned to the circle of light for the sermon. He began with a gesture Shan had not often seen, the right hand raised with palm and fingers pointing up. The
mudra
of dispelling fear. It cast an uneasy silence on the room. One of the young monks audibly sucked in his stomach, as though suddenly aware that something profound was happening. Then the hands shifted, clasping together with the middle fingers pointing upward. The diamond of the mind
mudra,
invoking cleansing and clarity of purpose. This was the sermon. The hands did not change. They floated, un-moving, as though carved of pale granite, while the devotees contemplated them. The message could not have been more intensely communicated if Choje had shouted it from a mountaintop. The pain was irrelevant, the hands said. The rocks, the blisters, the broken bones were inconsequential. Remember your purpose. Honor your inner god.

It wasn't clarity that Shan lacked. Choje had taught him how to focus like no teacher before. Through the long winter days when the warden kept them in—not for fear of losing prisoners, but for fear of losing guards—Choje had helped him reach an extraordinary discovery. To be an investigator, the only job Shan had ever known before the gulag, one had to have a troubled soul. The exceptional investigator could have no faith. Everything was suspect, everything transitory, moving from allegation to fact to cause to effect to new mystery. There could be no peace, for peace only came with faith. No, it wasn't clarity he lacked. In moments like this, with dark premonition weighing heavy, with his prior life pulling him like a man tangled in an anchor line, what he lacked was an inner god.

He saw there was something on the floor below Choje's hands. The bloody rock. With a start, Shan realized that he and Choje were thinking about the same thing. The
kenpo
was reminding his priests of their duty. Shan's tongue went dry. He wanted to blurt out a protest, to beg them not to put themselves at risk over a dead foreigner, but the
mudra
silenced him like a spell.

He clamped his eyes shut but still Shan could not focus
on Choje's message. He kept seeing something else each time he tried to concentrate. He kept seeing the gold cigarette lighter hanging five hundred feet above the valley floor. And the dead American who had beckoned to him in his daylight nightmare.

Suddenly a low whistle came from the door. The candles were extinguished, and a moment later the ceiling light switched on. A guard slammed open the door and moved to the center of the room, a pick handle cradled in his arm. Behind him came Lieutenant Chang. With mock solemnity Chang extended a piece of clothing so that no prisoner could mistake it. It was a clean shirt. He jabbed it toward several men as though feinting with a blade, laughing as he did so. Then he abruptly flung it at Shan, who lay on the floor.

“Tomorrow morning,” he snapped, and marched out.

 

A sharp, chill wind slapped Shan's face as Sergeant Feng escorted him through the wire the next morning. The winds were harsh to the 404th, which sat at the base of the northernmost ridge of the Dragon Claws, a vast rock wall rising nearly vertically behind it. Updrafts sometimes ripped roofs from huts. Downdrafts sometimes pelted them with gravel.

“Already reduced,” Sergeant Feng muttered as he locked the gate behind them. “Nobody already reduced ever got the shirt.” He was a short, thick bull of a man, with a heavy stomach and equally heavy shoulders, his skin as leathery as that of the prisoners from years of standing guard in sun and wind and snow. “Everyone's waiting. Making bets,” Feng added with a dry croak Shan took to be a laugh.

Shan tried to will himself not to listen, not to think of the stable, not to remember Zhong's white-hot fury.

Zhong's temper was in control for once. But the warden's gloating smile as he paced around Shan scared him more than the expected tantrum. He gripped his upper right arm, which often twitched in Zhong's presence. Once they had connected battery wires there.

“If he had bothered to consult with me,” Zhong said in the flat nasal tone of Fujian province, “I would have warned him. Now he will have to find out for himself what a damned troublemaker you are.” Zhong lifted a piece of paper from
his desk and read it, shaking his head in disbelief. “Parasite,” he hissed, then paused and scribbled on the paper to record the insight.

“It won't be for long,” he said, looking up expectantly. “One wrong step and you'll be breaking rocks with your bare hands. Until you die.”

“I constantly endeavor to fulfill the trust the people have bestowed in me,” Shan said without blinking.

The words seemed to please the warden. A perverse gleam rose on his face. “Tan's going to eat you alive.”

 

Sergeant Feng had an unfamiliar look, an almost festive air about him. A drive into Lhadrung, the ancient market town that served as county seat, was a rare treat for the 404th guards. He joked about the old women and goats who ran from the side of the road, spooked by the truck. He peeled an apple and shared it with the driver, ignoring Shan, who was wedged between the two men. With a spiteful grin, he repeatedly moved the key for Shan's manacles from one pocket to the next.

“They say the chairman himself sent you here,” the sergeant finally said as the low, flat buildings of the town came into view.

Shan didn't reply. He bent in his seat, trying to roll up his cuffs. Someone had produced a pair of worn, oversized gray trousers for him to wear, and a threadbare soldier's jacket. They had made him change clothes in the middle of the office. Everyone had stopped his work to watch.

“I mean, why else would they put you in with them?”

Shan straightened. “I'm not the only Chinese.”

Feng grunted as though amused. “Sure. Model citizens, every one. Jilin, he killed ten women. Public Security would have put a bullet in him except his uncle was a Party secretary. That one from Squad Six, he stole the safety gear from an oil rig in the ocean. To sell in the black market. Storm came and fifty men died. Letting him have a bullet was too easy on him. Special cases, you from home.”

“Every prisoner is a special case.”

Feng grunted again. “People like you, Shan, they just keep for practice.” He stuffed two slices of apple into his
mouth.
Momo gyakpa,
he was called behind his back,
fat dumpling,
for the curve of his belly and the way he was always scavenging food.

Shan turned away. He looked over the expanse of heather and hills rolling like a sea toward the high ice-clad ranges. It offered the illusion of escape. Escape was always an illusion for those who had no place to escape to.