CHAPTER NINE

Sky Burial

Terry’s parties were well known to Lhasa’s overland travelers. An alcoholic and poly-substance abuser who smoked opium to wean himself from intravenous heroin, Terry cultivated the appearance of a suicidal clown: black eye-liner running into hastily applied rouge, electric lavender and orange pajamas, and a shawl draped protectively around his shoulders. He was fastidious about ensuring that he acquired all of the essential ingredients for a successful bash. Tonight he was proud to be offering forty liters of Tibetan chang.

Because of the 10:00 P.M. curfew, people began arriving before dark and filled the hall at the Banak Shol’s rear perimeter. German punk, Japanese new wave, and English rock and roll blasted out over the Tibetan homes in the Barkhor. From a balcony I surveyed the moonlit clotheslines of socks and underwear in the courtyard and the hallway that led to our rooms. I was convinced that the police would come to arrest us, and that I would have to climb over the hotel’s rear wall. John said I was being histrionic. I no longer found any glamour in the idea of an overland escape.

“Come in before you freeze to death,” John said from inside the hall. I didn’t answer. He and Otto climbed out the window to join me on the balcony, and I listened to them discuss a demonstration John had seen today at the post office. Eighty monks from Drepung Monastery dressed in civilian clothes marched all the way into town before being discovered. Four trucks of soldiers drove past them on the way to the monastery. When the soldiers arrived at Drepung and realized their mistake, they raced back into town. According to Otto, the soldiers found the monks in front of the post office, beat them with cattle prods and rifle butts, and carted the limp bodies away in the trucks. John said that he hadn’t seen anyone unconscious.

“I was afraid to take pictures,” John said. “A woman next to me got her film taken.”

John’s description of the demonstration prompted toasts to the Tibetan freedom fighters. “We will have a travelers’ demonstration,” Otto said.

“No more politics tonight,” Terry said from inside the hall. “We have forty liters of chang to drink.”

John’s story of the beaten monks blended with the details of my day: another boy dying of sepsis whose parents were afraid to let us into their home; a forty-seven-year-old woman shot in the breast; and a sixty-eight-year-old man who had been shot from a rooftop. We also learned of an imprisoned monk who had suffered a compound fracture of his right arm. during a torture session.

“The Chinese are even crueler than the Americans,” Otto said. “I would like to shoot the police. Maybe I steal an AK-47.”

I heard the sound of glass shattering as a rock crashed through a window above the tape player. This didn’t stop the blaring music. Like Otto, I had thought of killing. During the riot I had imagined getting a gun. When I was charging at the police, I don’t know what I would have done with a gun if I had gotten one, but I knew that I had wanted to kill. This realization frightened me more than the idea of being shot. My life and training as a physician had taught me to respect all life. Now I feared I was becoming obsessed with the thought of taking life.

“A toast to Otto,” John said. “We won’t see him again if he’s shot by the Chinese police.”

More toasts, and curses at the rock thrower, accompanied the music that continued to bombard the Barkhor. It occurred to me that the stone thrower may have been hiding someone wounded during the riot; perhaps they just wanted to sleep. I wanted to enjoy myself at the party and felt jealous that I could not relax. I also felt repulsed by Westerners enjoying themselves while Tibetans were dying.

From the balcony we watched as, across the courtyard, four of the five policeman who had arrested John and me—the mute, two deputies, and the young Tibetan trying to grow sideburns—walked down a hall and knocked at our door, which John had padlocked. “Now do you believe it?” I challenged John.

We saw a young Tibetan man sprint conspicuously along a third-floor balcony above the police, slide down a corrugated metal roof, and lower himself into the courtyard. The brilliant moon illuminated his frenetic dash through the clotheslines and his ascent up a ladder to our balcony. He moved with the awkward intensity of an animal that was about to be slaughtered. Breathless, he told us his name was Namgyal. I wondered if he was working with the Tibetan underground.

“Very bad men,” Namgyal said, flipping his pinky up. Chang perfumed his breath and slurred his speech.

“Why are the police here?” John asked.

“All foreigners must leave Lhasa. The police have developed their film of the riot. They will arrest everyone involved. Everyone.” Namgyal left as frantically as he had come, reversing his route down the ladder into the courtyard. The police were sure to see him.

“Let’s leave,” I implored John.

“You can leave if you want to,” John said. “We’re getting more chang.” Otto and John climbed back inside, leaving me alone to brood out in the cold.

“You’re under arrest!” a deep voice boomed. I jumped and looked around frantically—there was nowhere to run on the balcony. Then Julie appeared, smiling, climbing out the window. “Nice trick,” I said, shivering. She covered me with a blanket and we hid in the shadows. The four police officers came four different times to our room, and four times an acid knife gouged at my stomach as they pounded and yelled at the door. But for some reason they never tried to break in, nor did they come to look for us at the party. “They’re afraid of us,” John boasted later, but I wasn’t inclined to take unnecessary chances. I cursed him for staying here tonight, and for making me realize that I could not leave, either. When the police finally left the hotel at four, Julie and I went into our room, made love, and fell asleep, while John and the others partied through the night.

“The police came to our hotel last night. They were checking visas,” Mark said at the next morning’s medical meeting. He sat next to Heidi, their arms and legs touching. “I didn’t care that my visa had expired,” Mark said, “but all of our extra medicines were under the bed. I stayed under the covers and pretended to be sick. I said I had been vomiting and had violent diarrhea. They ordered me to leave as soon as I could travel. I’m going to sleep at a safe house tonight. You axe all welcome to stay there if you want.”

Mark described the house of a Tibetan friend of his. It reminded me of the home of Carolyn’s Tibetan family, but nothing about it sounded safe—especially when Andrew said that he would stay there. That night Julie and I snuck into a different hotel’s dormitory for a catnap and left before the hotel employees woke up. If we were caught, I reasoned, it would be better for the hotel if we had not registered.

Mark and Heidi met a man named Tenzin in the Barkhor, who led me to Lodi, another gunshot victim from the riot. Tenzin was so nervous that he made me nervous. His pin-striped suit seemed an anachronism in the Barkhor. When we got to Lodi’s house, Tenzin said that after Lodi was shot in the calf, the police had taken him to the People’s Hospital, where a Chinese surgeon removed the bullet. I told him that I had not heard of any wounded Tibetans receiving medical care at The People’s hospital.

“After the surgeon finished sewing the wound,” Tenzin replied, “Lodi ran away. Otherwise the police would have taken him to prison.”

Lodi sat in a chair with both legs on a stool. I later learned he was twenty-six years old, but a fever and taut facial muscles made him look much older. Lodi looked so ill that I barely noticed a petite Tibetan woman with us, who I assumed was his daughter. Lodi’s wound was badly infected. The sutures had to be cut and the abscess drained or he would die from sepsis.

Lodi laughed and I asked what was so funny. “Lodi says he must have very bad luck,” Tenzin said. “He sprained his good ankle when he was running away from the police.”

“Lodi has good luck not to be in prison,” I said.

Lodi repeated three times that he would have done anything to avoid going to prison. He had heard about the special torture teams that had come from Chengdu to Lhasa’s Gutsa Prison, which used new electrical devices on Tibetan prisoners. He asked why I washed my hands, and I gave him a graphic description of great “Kali germs” that destroy all neighboring flesh unless you take “special pills” that His Holiness also takes when he gets sick.

“Dalai Lama yapo-du,” Lodi said as I cut his sutures to a rush of foul-smelling pus.

“Dalai Lama yapo-du,” I said. Lodi winced as I irrigated the pus from the wound. I explained how the “special pills” circulated in the blood, and why his daughter had to wash her hands before she changed his bandage.

Tenzin said that the nineteen-year-old “daughter” was Lodi’s wife, Kunyang. She had a terrible skin infection that had not gone away for over one year. The Tibetan doctors at the Mendzekang had tried many different medicines. None had any effect, until they tried penicillin. Now the infection was improving. I asked Kunyang how many children she had and she looked down in shame. I looked to Tenzin to see what I had said wrong. He looked away.

With tears in her eyes, Kunyang talked softly in Tibetan. Tenzin translated: “Last year, Kunyang was six months’ pregnant. The work unit leader saw that she was showing and ordered her to go to the People’s Hospital for a checkup. Inside the hospital, the Chinese doctor said that she needed an operation to save her life. Kunyang insisted that she was healthy. She argued with the doctors but it was no use. The nurse injected her belly with something that made the baby come out. She heard the baby cry. Then the nurse gave an injection into the soft spot on the baby’s forehead. The next day Kunyang was forced to have an operation. She says she cannot have any more children.”

“Give me your medical bag,” Andrew demanded the next afternoon. He looked delighted. “It’s not fair to your patients. You’re too high-profile. The police have come to your room two days in a row. The streets are teeming with army and undercover police.”

I gave Andrew my shoulder bag. Instead of yelling at him I wanted to cry. The truth was that it would be a relief not to sneak out to see patients. Like the wounded Tibetans I had snuck out to treat, I had also become a fugitive. I was afraid to stay in Lhasa and afraid to go back to my hotel in case the police were there. I was afraid of my patients dying from infection and afraid to go to their homes in case we were seen. Stripped of my medicine bag, I could no longer hide behind the brave image of a physician helping the wounded.

More than explicit violence, I was afraid of the implicit violence in Tibet’s military occupation: the wounded being sent to prison; the routine torture of prisoners; women entering Chinese hospitals for checkups and being forced to have abortions and be sterilized. I was also afraid for those Tibetans who remembered their country before the Chinese invaded, and for the two generations of children who had grown up in fear.

On what I thought might be our last night together, Julie and I went to an after-hours bar packed with other Westerners who had decided to stay in Lhasa as long as they could. We held hands under the table. Heidi had her arm around Mark. John cuddled a puppy in his lap. “Her name is Rangzen,” John said. “I found her on the street. Rangzen means freedom in Tibetan.”

“Him,” I corrected, inspecting the dog’s genitals.

John stroked the puppy affectionately. “I wonder where Rangzen and I will sleep tonight.”

“I saw a man get dragged out of his house this afternoon,” Julie said. “On the main street. Six policemen beat him unconscious with their rifles. I heard his head crack.”

“This afternoon I saw a Tibetan man swerve his bicycle in front of a police jeep,” Mark said. “The driver had to swerve and slammed on the brakes. He jumped out and beat the man to the ground with a truncheon. Then a fat man got out of the jeep with his pistol drawn. He stepped on the Tibetan’s neck and put the pistol to his head, the whole time yelling in Chinese. ‘Shoot me,’ I yelled, ‘Shoot me, you bastard,’ until the police got back in their jeep and drove off.”

“We have to get out of here,” John said.

“You’ve got to get your film out,” Julie said.

“The first scheduled commercial flight to Kathmandu is leaving in two days,” John said. “A bus leaves from the Lhasa Hotel to the airport at four in the morning. We could dress in clean clothes. The police won’t expect us to be mixed in with the Holiday Inn tourists, and that crowd doesn’t get searched.”

An Australian man at an adjacent table pulled a lubricated condom over his head, which squashed his eyes shut and flattened his nose. He gulped air through his mouth and exhaled through his nose to inflate the condom like a balloon. His table of fellow Australians stamped their feet and banged their fists and their countryman’s neck and cheeks turned scarlet, as the tip of the condom swelled to basketball size and exploded.

Out on the empty street, John ripped the latest in a series of official announcements off a wall:

The No. 3 Announcement by the People’s Government of the City of Lhasa

In order to ensure the smooth implementation of the opening police, to promote the development of tourism industry in our region, to increase our economic and technical exchange and cooperation with different countries in the World, to avoid appearance of displeasure in foreign affairs’s work, the city announces as follows:

1.		We extend welcome to friends from the different countries in the World who come to our region for sight-seeing, tour, visit, work, trade discussion and economic cooperation.
2.		Who ever comes to our region must respects our State sovereignty, abide by the lows of our country. They are not allowed to interfere in internal affairs of our country and engage in activities that are incompatible with their status.
3.		Foreigners are not allowed to crowd around watching and photographing the disturbances manipulated by a few splittists, and they should not do any distorted propaganda concerning disturbances, which is not in agreement with the facts.
4.		In accordance with our lows, we shall mete out punishment to the troublemakers who stir up, support and participate in the disturbance manipulated by a few splittists.

Mark, Heidi, Julie. Otto, John, Rangzen, two fellow inebriated travelers, and I all proceeded to rip down every Chinese poster in the Barkhor, in defiance of the local lows. We stopped outside the Kiri Hotel’s two-story metal gate, which had been locked for the night. Climbing the gate would have been a formidable task when sober. Instead we played hackysack under the streetlight.

A rock skidded through our group. We could barely make out three silhouettes fifty yards away next to a vehicle. I stopped the next rock with my foot. They couldn’t throw far enough to hit us directly. John picked up a rock. So did Otto, Julie, and the two travelers. “One, two, three,” I whispered, and we launched a collective volley with no thought of the consequences. Our rocks, too, fell far short of our target. The silhouettes jumped into the vehicle, which backlit their dome-shaped helmets. We froze in the approaching headlights.

The two travelers ran down a side alley Julie and I scrambled over the gate and sprinted across the courtyard. Mark, John, Heidi, and Otto followed. The vehicle stopped outside the gate. The police got out and yelled for the gatekeeper as a flashlight beam probed the dark recesses of the courtyard. Julie and I hid in the toilets. The gatekeeper would have to let the police in. They would wake up every traveler and tear the hotel apart. How could we have been so stupid? I held my breath and stared between the horribly stained porcelain foot pads. I never thought I could have hidden in a Tibetan toilet, even if it meant avoiding prison. I was naive. Julie and I huddled there for hours, unsure if the police had left. We did not see the others again until morning.

I felt no animosity toward Andrew when we met for the last time to talk about our patients, only sadness for how little I had been able to do for the wounded. As a direct result of gunshot wounds and beatings during the October 1 riot, we had confirmed twelve deaths. We also had documented fourteen Tibetans with bullet wounds, two monks with burns, and five Tibetans with multiple contusions from severe beatings. Andrew fastidiously recorded the name, sex, and age of each patient, the location of entrance and exit wounds, course of treatment, and prognosis. He also recorded details about four monks who were still missing from the Jokhang, two monks believed to have been killed by lethal injection, and the eighty monks from Drepung Monastery who were clubbed with cattle prods and AK-47s before being taken to prison.

Andrew thanked me for what I had done and said that he would stay as long as he could to collect the names of Tibetan prisoners. At that moment, standing in the street and wishing Andrew luck, I realized the importance of his forty-five-page handwritten document for the press. I admired his tenacity and his obsessive attention to detail. Andrew smiled and excused himself abruptly.

“There’s a monk dying in the Jokhang,” Julie said the next after noon. “A monk approached me in the market. He said the police hit his friend many times on the head during the riot. Two days ago he started losing coordination. The monks didn’t think anything of it. Then his speech became slurred. Now he’s unconscious.”

What Julie described was called a subdural hematoma. The police had hit the monk’s head hard enough to break a blood vessel in his brain, which continued to bleed. The monk needed a hole bored in his skull to relieve the pressure. The thought of the monk’s brain being squeezed against the inside of his skull made me shudder. So did the thought of trying to perform a trephination with a Swiss Army knife. “There’s nothing I can do,” I said. “Even if—”

Julie pulled a Dalai Lama postcard from the back pocket of her jeans. “If he can still see, we can hold a picture of His Holiness as an offering,” she said. Julie was right. I felt embarrassed for hesitating. I was so tired that the thought of getting arrested seemed appealing; at least then I could relax.

We walked arm in arm through the Barkhor Square, where snipers with binoculars and telephoto lenses occupied the rooftops. Before completing a circuit around the Jokhang, we slipped into a close-by construction site. Chinese workers stopped laying bricks to giggle at the two lovers stealing up a bamboo ladder into the depths of an unfinished building. We continued to a back window that let us onto one of the Jokhang’s rooftops. After crossing several terraces, we dropped onto Lobsang’s balcony.

Lobsang jumped when we stepped into his room. It was reassuring to see his face. Shadows from seven butter lamps leapt across the walls as I used my elementary Tibetan and sign language to describe Julie’s unconscious monk. Lobsang did not understand and left us alone in his quarters. Sitting quietly on the hard bench, I realized that I was bored. So much had already happened to us in Lhasa that I now needed the adrenaline rush I had become used to getting on a regular basis.

Lobsang returned with Tashi, a monk from Amdo who spoke English. “No one has heard of an unconscious monk.” Tashi translated. “The police are preparing to storm the Jokhang. They have done this many times, sometimes killing monks. It is dangerous for you here. You have to leave. Lobsang wants you to take a message to His Holiness.”

Lobsang looked at me quizzically and laughed. I asked why and Tashi said, “He’s waiting for you to take notes.” I pulled a four-by-four-inch bandage wrapper from my pocket and tried to write fast enough to keep up with Tashi’s translating. “Puchong was shot through the left chest inside the police station on October 1,” Tashi said. “Lobsang went to get the body with some of the other monks two days ago. When he asked for the body, the police demanded 650 yuan. Lobsang said monks did not have that kind of money. The police wrote their names down in a book and said if they didn’t bring the money the next day they would all go to prison.

“Lobsang came back with the money,” Tashi continued. “Puchong’s hands were still tied behind his back. One bullet went through his chest. Another went through the stomach. The back of his head was crushed. Large bruises covered his kidneys. There were many bruises and cuts on all limbs. Puchong’s body went to Sera for sky burial. Do you have all this down?”

Writing down what Tashi translated wasn’t the problem. Reading it would be. Lobsang stopped talking and Julie asked if he had heard of any women in prison. Lobsang started talking again at high speed.

“For participating in the October 1 demonstration, Namla was taken to Gutsa Prison on the same day. She is only twenty-three years old, from Garu Nunnery. The police stripped her and beat her with sticks with nails in the ends, rifle butts, and electric sticks. They also beat her while she was hanging from her ankles with a heater placed under her head, for hours. The police tied her to an electric bed, and tied an electric belt around her breasts.” Tashi stopped translating and giggled with embarrassed discomfort. I asked what was funny and he said, “The police jabbed the electric stick into Namla’s vagina.”

I asked Tashi how Lobsang had come to know all of this. He said that Lobsang knew the woman’s sister well. I looked for another scrap of paper to write on and Lobsang unfurled two white silk katas and put them over our necks.

“Lobsang thanks both of you for what you have done for the Tibetan people,” Tashi said. “He says that he will never forget you. He asks you to please tell the Dalai Lama what is happening to his country.”

Like many Westerners who had seen the riot, Julie had decided not to leave, but to stay as long as she could to gather more information. The mobile loudspeakers broadcast in the streets that the authorities would be “lenient” with Tibetans who participated in the demonstration. Criminals who didn’t give themselves up would be “punished.” Julie and I planned to meet again somewhere, in Nepal, India, or back in the States. We told each other how much we wished we had more time together. We exchanged addresses and phone numbers and wept on each other’s shoulders as we hugged.

John and I took showers, shaved, and washed our clothes, the better to blend in with the tourists at the airport. Before walking to the bus, which left at 2:00 A.M., John hid rolls of film in his dirty socks and underwear and scattered condoms throughout his pack, in an attempt to distract soldiers at the airport customs. We fought continuously during the hour-long walk to the Lhasa Hotel, but we agreed to pretend that we did not know each other at the airport; if the police held one of us back, the other would try to keep going. Four soldiers got on the bus with us.

At 6:00 A.M. the bus droned steadily up the Lhasa valley. The Tibetan homes and fields of barley in the valley seemed impossibly far away from the tumult of the demonstrations. A donkey stood unattended in a stream. Smoke curled out of an adobe house. A British couple complained that the bus was taking too long, and then we had to wait in line while soldiers checked each passport individually. I went before John. Two male soldiers perused my passport and handed it to a woman, who noticed the canceled visa. She yelled at the men for what they had missed.

“Why canceled?” she demanded angrily.

“I made cheese out of yogurt to sell to tourists,” I said. “I had to pay a fine.”

“How much fine?”

“Fifty FEC.”

The woman’s professionally angry demeanor cracked. She smiled as though this had been an appropriate punishment and said, “I hope you learn from this lesson.” She waved me on. “Stop,” a soldier yelled, I spun around and the woman pointed to the airport tax counter. I was so happy to pay the airport tax that I didn’t even mind waiting for John to get through customs.

John looked nervous when he handed his passport to the male soldiers. Once again, they both missed the canceled visa and the woman yelled at them. I imagined John being led away. He said something I couldn’t hear and they waved him through. “They didn’t even search me,” John said after he paid the airport tax. “She asked me why my visa was canceled. Naturally, I told her the truth, that you had thrown rocks at the police—”

“John!” I exclaimed loud enough to startle a couple next to us.

“You would make a terrible secret agent,” John said. “I told her I had changed 100 FEC for yuan on the black market. She wanted to know how much I was fined. I said thirty FEC and she said that wasn’t bad. Someone else was fined fifty FEC for selling homemade cheese to tourists.

We waited another hour for the rest of the passengers to be processed through customs, another hour for a bus that took us to the plane, and thirty minutes standing on the tarmac while soldiers walked up and down the line, intimidating each passenger. Amid this final display of force, I noticed three sleek black helicopters with exaggerated blades stationed farther down the runway.

Instead of being ecstatic when the plane took off, John and I sat on separate sides of the cabin. As the snowcapped Himalayas passed beneath us, I wondered how many Tibetans were trying to escape across the mountains at that moment. What would happen to the burned monk? How many wounded Tibetans would die in their homes? How many people were being tortured in prisons? I felt defeated thinking of the ten-year-old boy who would die soon from infection. Up to now in my life I had always thought that living would be better than dying, no matter what. I had never seen children slaughtered in the street. I had never met monks tortured in prison and women sterilized against their will. In a moment of despair, I wondered if the Tibetan boy would be better off dying than living under Chinese military occupation.

I looked back at John and saw him staring out the window. I cried in fitful, uncontrollable sobs, and envisioned the body of a dead monk lying on a boulder. It was Puchong, Lobsang’s friend. Large, ugly bruises covered the corpse, which had been shot once in the chest and once in the abdomen. The wrists were still tied behind the back.

When the sun hit the rock, the body breakers stopped drinking chang and began to hack flesh from the corpse. They chopped the body into small pieces and crushed the bones. Vultures waited patiently at the crest of the hill. Clotted blood spilled onto the rock and over the hands of the body breakers, who worked quickly, without pause, to prepare their celestial offering. In Tibet’s high-altitude desert, with little wood for cremation and burial reserved for criminals whose souls should not be reborn, sky burial was a practical solution to the problem of death’s decay. Once the flesh and bones were mixed with barley flour, the sky became dark with enormous black wings as the vultures descended upon their corporeal feast.