Chapter Five
There was a mountain before him, and on the mountain was a squirrel and on the squirrel was a flea and on the flea was an eye that watched the sky, the flea wishing for wings. Shan kept his focus high, on the horizon. The mountain was there, but the rest was in his mind's eye only, his way of keeping distracted as the truck moved to the end of a long flat valley tucked into the north slope of the Kunlun. He shifted his gaze from the horizon to the floor of the truck, not daring to look at the huge barbed wire compound they approached.
He knew he had to speak to Lau's driver, Wangtu and any other of Xu's recent detainees Jakli might find. But as they had driven into the arid valley that contained Glory Camp, the black shapeless thing— his legacy of the gulag— had crawled into his gut again, and he had fought a sudden urge to leap out of the truck. No, it's only a reeducation camp, he told himself, not one of the gulag prisons where they trained you with electric shock and ball peen hammers, where misfits like Shan were sent to have their souls splintered and their bodies battered. Not a real prison. Only a reeducation camp, he told himself again as they approached the mile-long row of barbed wire that defined the front of the compound. But when he looked down he saw that his hands were shaking. He placed his right hand over his left forearm and squeezed, trying to control the reaction. Then he noticed the spot his hand covered and squeezed even tighter.
"Are you in pain?" Jakli inquired, with a motion of her hand that caused Fat Mao to slow the truck.
No, Shan was tempted to say, I am not in pain, I am in weakness. If he were caught and they checked the tattoo numbers, they would classify him as an escapee. What had Jowa said to Gendun? They would simply take Shan behind a rock and shoot him. He felt as though at any moment he would lose control of his body and it would fling itself out of the truck. But he just stared at the floor. On the floor was a pebble and on the pebble was a lichen and in the lichen lived a mite.
Jakli had driven from Lau's cabin to a small compound of windblown structures on the Kashgar highway consisting of a shed with a bank of gas pumps outside it, a larger garage building surrounded by vehicles in various states of disrepair, and, on the opposite side of the road, a square cinder block structure, painted yellow, with a large glass window and a hand-lettered sign that said only
Tea.
She made a series of phone calls from a phone by the gas pumps, and an hour later a delivery truck en route to Glory Camp had stopped for them. Three men were inside, Fat Mao at the wheel and two Kazakhs with heavy moustaches whom Shan recognized as Akzu's sons. The Kazakhs had climbed out onto the burlap sacks in the back of the heavy open bay vehicle to make room for Jakli and Shan in the cab. A fourth man had climbed down from the sacks, a sullen, broad-shouldered man with cold eyes and a gutter of scar tissue on his neck that could only have been made by a bullet. Jakli had introduced him as Ox Mao. Ox Mao had silently climbed into the turtle truck and driven away with Jowa, Lokesh, and Bajys.
Jakli silently placed her hand on Shan's white knuckles, then slowly pried his fingers and moved his hand away. She rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and traced the tattooed string of numbers with her finger. "I have other friends who survived the gulag," she said with a sigh. "But they always show it on their faces. I have never seen it on your face. You did well."
"No one does well," Shan whispered, looking at the tattoo. Four guards had held him down when he had resisted the ink needle. Finally they had lost patience and held his nose and mouth until he fell unconscious. When he had awakened, the numbers had been completed, and a political officer had been standing over him, gloating. "Wear it proudly," the officer had barked, "it proves the state still cares about you."
Jakli spoke in her Turkic tongue and Fat Mao reached under the seat, then handed her a small medical kit. She extracted a large adhesive bandage, peeled away the backing, and placed it over the tattoo. "There," she said, and rolled down his sleeve. "Just like us now."
Strangely, the coldness began to recede. He recalled her words. Other friends, she had said. As if Shan were a friend too.
The single guard at the small hut by the gate recognized the truck and began to open the gate before they reached the outer wire. They coasted through without stopping, slowing enough for Fat Mao to toss the soldier an apple. A faded banner, frayed at the edges, hung between two posts.
Become Liberated from Feudalism.
Shan's prisoner-eyes took over for a moment. The gate was not well maintained, its hinges loose and rusty. Much of the wire in both the gate and the perimeter fence also appeared rusted. The guard himself was overweight and middle-aged, not one of the crack People's Liberation Army or Public Security troops that controlled hard larbor prisons, and his carbine looked older than the guard himself.
Wangtu would be on trusty duties, Fat Mao explained, since he was only being held for questioning, which meant he would be excused from camp routine to unload the weekly food delivery at the camp warehouse. Jakli pointed to the warehouse, a big square building between the perimeter fence and the inner wire that contained the prisoner barracks. They drove slowly toward the structure, past the low L-shaped building that housed the administrative offices for Glory to the People Camp. Several men in brown shirts and pants stood on the steps of the office building, watching their truck. He had not seen the men before, but he had seen the brown clothing, in the mountains before Gendun had disappeared.
"Brigade security," Jakli explained. "A small garrison of soldiers remain, but last year the Brigade assumed responsibility for administration of the camp."
Beyond the warehouse Shan saw a huge pile of coal and a small boiler building, marked by a fifty-foot-high smokestack. There were gulag prisons in Xinjiang, Shan knew, that were giant coal mines, where men and women led brutal lives extracting coal with hammer and chisel, providing coal to sister prison facilities and shipping the remainder to eastern cities.
Past the boiler was a cemetery.
After he climbed out, Shan looked back at the long rows of sun-bleached planks that served as markers, with the odd realization that he had not seen a cemetery for years. In Beijing land was too scarce to waste on the dead. Only the most important Party members or the wealthy were granted permanent graves. Others could pay for the right to be interred for a few years, to allow family a chance to visit, but when the contract expired the bodies were dug up and burned. The Buddhists he had known in Tibet still practiced sky burial, leaving the dead for the vultures, the quickest way to return the body to the circle of life.
Suddenly a harsh voice erupted from the loudspeakers arrayed on poles around the compound, announcing in Mandarin that Sessions in Praise of Party Heroes would commence in ten minutes. Shan surveyed the compound inside the inner wire fence as it came to life. Barracks— most constructed of cement block with tin roofs, others of plywood whose layers were peeling away— lined three sides of a square nearly a third of a mile on each side. The U-shape they formed opened at the front, toward the administrative complex where the truck now sat. At a second, inner gate that led to the barracks two more guards could be seen, one leaning against a post as if asleep. One of the buildings, the nearest to the inner gate, had heavy wire covering its windows and four guards sitting on a bench by its door. Shan studied it closely, suddenly aware that Gendun could be inside.
Past the barracks, at the end of the inner compound, Shan could see fields, empty except for one large plot with scores of cabbages. Beyond the wire to the south and east were brown, grass-covered hills on which scattered sheep grazed.
With painful memories he watched as hundreds of grey-clothed prisoners scurried toward their assigned political education classes. No one could be late. A lao jiao inmate did not suffer the deprivations of the gulag prisoner, but discipline was still strict. Shan's eyes drifted back toward the cemetery and studied the long rows of markers. Lao jiao prisoners were typically short-termers, sentenced to a few months or a year. That should mean that few would die during their term.
"They contract contagious diseases sometimes," Jakli said as she followed his gaze. "And two years ago there was a drought. People in the towns got the priority allocation of food. Next in priority were the agricultural enterprises, then the livestock. Then came the prisoners. Older prisoners died of malnutrition. They ate their belts, they ate their shoes, they ate bugs and worms. But they died anyway," she sighed. "And the Brigade sends lao gai prisoners who are too ill to work, just sends them here to die. They hate having underproductive workers lying around the coal mines. Sometimes," she added, "the boot squads bring special prisoners here, because it is so far from anywhere, so secret."
The truck backed toward a large plank building with a loading dock. As it stopped a figure wearing a white shirt and tie emerged from the administrative building and waved a clipboard at them. Jakli gestured Shan toward the cargo bay.
They had agreed in advance that Shan would push the sacks from the top, the position least visible to the guards, handing the sacks to the others until Jakli found a way to take Wangtu aside. PRODUCT OF GUANGDONG PROVINCE, Shan read on the burlap bags as he climbed to the top. It was another of Beijing's cruel jokes. The Tibetans and the Kazakhs, as well as the many other minorities of the western reaches, traditionally ate barley and wheat as their staples. But Beijing arranged for much of the local grain production to be shipped east for livestock feed and exchanged for rice, the staple of the Han Chinese. Explanatory tracts, written by the central government, were distributed among the local populations to demonstrate that rice was healthier. Rice, some even claimed, was what made the Han people smarter than others. An American acquaintance in Beijing had once laughed at Shan for being upset at a poster saying that Rice was the Food of Patriots. Just a marketing slogan, he had said.
From his perch on top of the rice bags Shan surveyed the camp again. He could see the graveyard clearly now, including several mounds of fresh dirt at the far end, and quickly calculated that it contained at least two hundred markers. A new building came into view— a shed for tools, perhaps— located between the boilerhouse and the cemetery. A movement at the side of the shed caught his eyes. As he watched, a figure stepped into view at the corner of the building, and the chill returned to his spine. The figure was a soldier but not one of the lazy, ill-equipped guards that stood at the wire. Even from over fifty yards away Shan recognized the uniform and the swagger. The man was from Public Security, a knob, and the weapon cradled in his arm was not an outdated rifle but a compact submachine gun.
"Are you ill?" Jakli called out for the second time that day, and he realized he had flattened himself against the sacks. Prisoner instincts died hard. "We must move," she explained as he rose and shook his head. She stretched out an arm to help him down from the truck.
Back in the cab of the truck Shan's fingers wove themselves into a mudra, his hands clasped together with the middle fingers pointing upward. Diamond of the Mind. Clarity of purpose. Remember your goal. Preserve mindfulness. He looked up from his hands just as the truck passed through the inner wire.
"I thought you meant we would leave!" he gasped.
"The loading dock is closed today," Jakli said as she looked back at the dock with a puzzled expression. "We have to unload half directly at the kitchens, then the other half tomorrow morning at the dock. We'll find Wangtu," she assured him, "one place or the other."
But in that moment Shan was not worried about finding Lau's driver. His tongue was so dry that he couldn't speak, or he might have shouted in protest. He was being taken back into prison after all. Had it all been some dreadful trick of his former jailers, to ensnare him behind government wire for a few more years?
Jakli placed her hand over his forearm again. "What were we to do? It would be more suspicious if we refused. You will be safe, I promise."
He realized he was sliding down in the seat, as if his body had willed itself to hide. He was being taken back into prison, and this time there would be no Buddhist monks to heal him when the jailers had finished with him.
A squeeze from Jakli's hand brought him back to reality. "It's only when you act like a prisoner that you become one," she observed in a calm, sober voice.
Her wisdom struck him like a fresh, cool wind, and it shamed him. He slowly sat up in the seat and said no more until they approached the long building at the base of the compound that served as kitchen and mess hall.
"I'm sorry," he said, fighting the temptation to again hold his tattoo.
Saying the words out loud somehow gave him strength but also heightened his shame.
There is nothing to fear behind the wires.
The words came back to him as starkly as when they had been spoken to him years earlier by a serene old monk serving his thirty-fifth year in the gulag.
For no jailer who ever lived can imprison the truth.
He stepped out and stared at the first of the barracks, the special detention barracks, two hundred yards away. "Do they bring those prisoners out for exercise?" he asked Jakli.
"No. People here call them the invisibles," she said with a sigh. "Special cases. Usually nothing to do with Yoktian."
