Major Sung waited for Shan at a bend in the road. His driver eased their car to a stop, gestured Shan out, then let all the others from Sung’s car climb in before driving on to Zhongje. They were at a cliff that overlooked miles of rolling, shadowed grasslands, with Zhongje a dusty smudge on the horizon.
“Are you going to jump, Major?” Shan asked. “Or just push me off.”
“They are enemies of the state,” Sung hissed.
“Who now have a film that will shame Beijing and destroy your career. When they post it on the Internet, it will get a million views. If it gets past Beijing’s filters, it will get a hundred million. ‘Hits’ they call them. As in you’ve been hit.”
“I’ve been shot in the fucking heart!” Sung spat.
“It was only your profile on the film. Maybe only Public Security will recognize you.”
Sung lit a cigarette and stepped to the very edge of the high cliff. His fury had a forlorn, helpless aspect.
“But if they meant to use it publicly, you’d already be getting calls.”
Sung seemed not to hear. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then blew out twin plumes from his nostrils. He finally turned. “What do you mean?”
“If they were trying to use the film to inflict the greatest damage to Beijing, they would have released it immediately, for fear censoring measures would be activated. Public Security isn’t above blocking all cell transmissions in Tibet. This is personal.”
“Personal?”
“A negotiation, Major.”
“Nonsense. This was just a pack of Tibetan hooligans.”
Shan said nothing. The cars on the highway below began switching on headlights. A flock of geese honked high overhead.
“Negotiation for what?”
“Let me go see.”
“You?”
“Give me a truck. I want Lokesh and two women from the stable who know Taktsang. Release them to me, no questions asked.”
“The negotiation already begins.”
“This is not negotiable. Give me three days. Say the Commission has to catch up on paperwork. No soldiers, no Public Security. Try to use a tracking device, and we will find it and destroy it.”
Sung nursed his cigarette. He knew his career was in ruins. When he finally spoke, it was toward the darkening sky. “If Pao finds out…” he began, then turned to Shan. “Tuan has to go.”
Shan took a long time to answer. “You mean as cover. So you can say the two of you saw a chance to secretly infiltrate the lair of the purbas and took it.” He shook his head. “I could never protect him.”
Sung’s grin was colder than the wind.
“At least give him the choice,” Shan said.
“I can’t order him to, but he will go. I could get lucky,” Sung observed. “They could kill you both.” The major walked along the edge of the cliff and looked at his cell phone. If the purbas had released the footage his career would be over with one short call. “It makes no sense. I would destroy them in a heartbeat. Why don’t they just destroy me?”
Shan now noticed the uneasy glances Sung cast toward the car and stepped closer to the black vehicle. A large tombstone-shaped piece of paper—one end square and one round—lay on the dashboard.
“It was just draped on the wheel when I got back in the car up there.” Sung’s voice was almost a whisper. “The same paper the burnt ones use for their verses.”
Shan swung the door open and sat, using the overhead light to examine the heavy paper. It was covered with Tibetan writing and symbols. In the center was a crudely drawn human figure, obviously male, standing in a triangle, which itself was enclosed by another larger triangle. In the space between the triangles were drawings of an ax, an arrow, a bow, a spear, a sword, and a hook. Arrayed along the outer edges were images of clouds, lotus flowers, and flames.
Sung appeared at his shoulder. “It’s called a lingam,” Shan explained. “A curse, a charm aimed at the destruction of the person depicted in the center.”
“You mean me.”
“No.” Shan pointed at the Tibetan letters under the little man. “It still has to be empowered. There’s a space at the bottom for you to sign, to empower it.” Shan turned to Sung. “It is an invitation, Major. This is the trade they want.”
“I don’t make deals with traitors.”
“They offer to save you from both the disasters that await you.”
“Both disasters?”
“They will save you from the destruction of your career by keeping the video of you with the burning Maos to themselves. They want you to sign this, and have me deliver it to them, to save you from the one who will otherwise kill you. Your mutual enemy.” This time he pointed to the Tibetan letters over the effigy figure. “This charm is for the destruction of Emperor Pao.”
* * *
Shan drove the old truck Sung had lent them over the high ridge above Shetok, then slowed as they approached the mounds of melted plastic that marked where the Maos had burned. Lokesh insisted on climbing out, then he ran to the first of the rocks with an energy that astonished Shan. The old man dropped to his knees on the flat outcropping and stretched his arms out, as he spoke toward the sky. When Shan and Tuan, with Yosen and Pema close behind, reached him, he was pointing at the other lumps of plastic and counting.
“Five, six!” he concluded, then looked up to see Shan’s confused expression.
“I dreamt this, Shan!” he exclaimed. “In the prison, I started having dreams like never before, after my dream led me to uncover that old mandala. First of my parents, then of my wife. Later it was of the Dalai Lama when I knew him as a boy, then of the next Dalai Lama in the arms of his mother. After a few nights, it was of the old lamas who died in our barracks at the 404th. It was so real. I thought they were ghosts who had come to visit. We spoke for hours. Once one just sat before me and recited the Diamond Sutra. Another came and told me all about the pure land. He said soon I would see for myself its jeweled trees and fragrant rivers.”
“Lha gyal lo!” The excited blessing came from Pema as she hurried to explore the other burnt rocks with Yosen. The two nuns and Lokesh had been waiting for Shan at dawn in the municipal equipment yard, sitting in a solitary utility vehicle driven by Sung. They were clearly fearful of the major, and had run to Shan, eyes round with surprise, when the major opened the doors.
Shan looked at his friend with new worry. The pure land was the home of the sainted dead.
“Then I began having actuating dreams,” Lokesh continued, “like the old lamas used to speak of. You dream something, and it comes true. First I dreamed that the mouse of my cell was sleeping in my pocket, and when I woke up, there he was.”
“But, Lokesh, surely after you tamed him, it wouldn’t be so strange for him to seek out the warmth of your pocket.”
The old Tibetan seemed not to hear. “Then the next day, I dreamed I was at the gates of that sacred land. There were three smoky fires blazing on big flat rocks on either side of the gate. I asked the lama who was the gatekeeper about the fires, and he said the false gods were burning.”
Tuan muttered a low curse. Lokesh turned with a smile to the young Religious Affairs officer. “It is a blessing to travel with you, my new friend Tuan. You have drifted all your life, but a harbor is in sight. Something inside you recognizes it.”
Tuan glanced at Shan and smiled uneasily. “What you see is my indigestion—my breakfast is not happy about all the bouncing around in this damned truck.”
They drove another five miles before the road faded into a narrow footpath that divided halfway up the slope before them—one fork climbing sharply upward before disappearing between two huge shear-faced outcroppings, the other following rolling hills toward a lake that shimmered in the distance. As Lokesh climbed out, he cocked his head toward the peaks and his eyes went round as if he’d heard something his companions were deaf to.
Shan retrieved the packs with food and blankets they had brought from Zhongje. “Which way?” he called, thinking the nuns were behind the truck.
“It’s been decided,” Tuan replied in a peevish tone. “The old fool must have had another dream.”
Shan turned. Lokesh was already climbing up the more forbidding of the two trails, traversing the steep rocky slope with the agility of a mountain goat. Yosen and Pema were having difficulty keeping up.
His old friend waited with a boyish grin on his face as Shan and Tuan arrived, winded, at the passage between the outcroppings. “Chakje! Do you see them?” he asked as he pointed to the rock walls.
As Shan and Tuan turned to the flat stone faces, Yosen pulled a water bottle from a pack and sprayed water over the stone. The moisture revealed four sets of subtle indentations in the rock, all in the same spidery pattern.
A laugh escaped Lokesh’s throat as he raised a hand and fit it into the first pattern. “Four chakje!” he exclaimed. “Four different saints! Where else in all of Tibet are there four together?”
Yosen saw the confusion on Tuan’s face. Shan at last understood, but clearly Tuan did not. “Chakje are the prints left by ancient saints as they travel through the mountains,” the young nun explained. “The rock gave way at their touch.”
Tuan gave a skeptical shake of his head. “All I see is the scratchings of some ancient glacier.”
Lokesh turned to Tuan with disappointment in his eyes, “Only when you learn to nurture the saint inside you will you be able to sense their presence.” He was not put off by Tuan’s laugh. “I am sorry if you look about and see only rock and grass. This land is alive with spirits. If you go farther, they will reach out to you. Whether they deal with you harshly depends entirely on you.”
Tuan’s laugh became low and hesitant. He paused, again looking about with an uncertain expression. The nuns had vanished. Lokesh pointed to the passage, into which they had disappeared. Tuan shrugged, produced small earbuds on wires, touched the little box in his shirt pocket and impatiently pushed past Lokesh, murmuring his own rock and roll mantra.
Minutes later, they left the narrow stone passage and stepped out onto a huge grassy slope. Yaks grazed before them. Half a mile away, a small flock of chiru antelope frolicked by a stream. Tuan made a pantomime of aiming and shooting a rifle at them.
They climbed the path into a second passage between two rock faces, each painted with a giant human eye that gazed upon on all who entered. After several minutes of finding their way through the dense shadows, they emerged at the top of a mile-long uninhabited valley. There was no sign of the nuns.
Magnificent snowcapped peaks could be seen in every direction. Huge misshapen outcroppings, bearded with lichen, rose up along their path like a file of frozen demons. The vast untamed landscape seemed to enfold them, protecting them, and Shan felt a lightness of spirit he had not known in months.
Suddenly Tuan, impatiently leading, seemed to falter, then stopped. He removed his earbuds and stared in mute surprise. A hundred yards ahead of them on an outcropping that loomed over the trail was a huge yak bull. It was snow white.
Lokesh’s hand shot to his gau. A serene smile lit his face.
A white yak was a form taken by fierce protector spirits, a creature of ancient myths told at campfires. In prison, Shan had listened to stories of aged relatives who glimpsed one, of villages blessed with a sighting generations earlier that brought bountiful harvests for decades. When working in the high mountains, their prison road crews had always been watchful for a sighting of such a pure yak and would sing with joy at merely finding white hair on a bush, always convincing themselves it could not be from a goat or sheep. Many prisoners complained that the creatures had abandoned Tibet, that such blessings had been denied modern Tibetans. But Lokesh and the oldest lamas had always smiled and replied that it was all in how you looked for them.
It was Shan who stepped forward past his hesitant companions. The yak watched him, cocking its head but showing no signs of flight. After several steps, he heard movement behind him, and the yak snorted loudly. Shan turned to see Tuan a few feet away, gazing nervously at the animal, which seemed wary of his advance.
Lokesh arrived at Tuan’s side. He bowed his head for a moment toward the yak, then circled Tuan, studying him. With a slow, deliberate motion he pulled the music player from Tuan’s pocket and pulled the buds out of his ears. Tuan, staring transfixed at the creature, seemed not to notice until Lokesh knelt and placed the device on a flat rock by the trail and began stacking smaller rocks around it. After a moment, Tuan knelt too and helped him finish the small cairn.
“In the dirt, with your fingers,” Lokesh suggested, “make the mani mantra.”
Tuan seemed reluctant. “I didn’t sign up for a pilgrimage,” he murmured. He looked up into Lokesh’s serene smile, then at the yak, and shrugged, extending a finger to draw the mantra.
When Tuan rose, Lokesh took a small tsa tsa from his own pocket and dropped it in the young man’s palm, then motioned him forward. The Religious Affairs officer held the little clay deity in front of him like a talisman and followed Lokesh up the trail with small, worried steps. The yak continued to cock its head at them but offered no further protest.
They walked within ten paces of the magnificent animal, but it did not move other than to turn its shaggy head to keep its steady gaze on them. Lokesh pointed to a clump of white hair on some heather, and Tuan bent to retrieve it, stuffing it in his pocket.
What they had taken to be another cleft leading to one more chasm proved to be the entrance to a chiseled tunnel. Long ago, its walls had been plastered. Shafts of light entering through cracks in the rocks overhead illuminated faded paintings of demons on the crumbling surface.
Tuan hesitated once again as they passed the first protector demons, a vicious-looking cat creature holding a human skin and an ogre wearing a necklace of severed heads. He took a step backwards and seemed about to retreat. Lokesh placed a hand on his shoulder. “The only ones who need worry about them are those who hide their true selves,” the old Tibetan said. Tuan glanced nervously at Shan. His entire life was dedicated to hiding his true self.
“You have Tibetan blood—I can see that,” Lokesh continued. “It is not your fault you were given only Chinese things to study when you were young. But as a man, it is your fault if you ignore your blood. You were made for better things, young Tuan. I can see it behind your eyes. The gods have a destiny for you.”
Tuan grimaced. But then his gaze dropped to the leathery hand on his shoulder, which seemed to puzzle him further. “There are people where we are going who will probably want me dead,” he said.
Lokesh somberly shook his head. “Only worry about the gods. Then what people want won’t matter.”
Tuan noticed now that Lokesh’s hand had moved, and was extended to his. Tuan lifted his hand, and Lokesh covered it in both of his, squeezing it tightly. “Lha gyal lo,” the old man murmured.
“Lya gyal lo,” Tuan mumbled.
Lokesh took Tuan’s right hand and raised it to his chest, then with his own hand showed how to slightly cup it with his thumb over his heart. “Abhaya,” the old Tibetan explained. “The mudra for dispelling fear.”
Tuan said nothing, but did not lower his cupped hand as Lokesh gestured him forward.
Shan could not suppress a satisfied grin as he watched the two progress along the passage before him, stopping at each faded painting as Lokesh described its image. At last, for the first time in weeks, he was seeing the Lokesh he had come to cherish, a gentle old lama guiding a novice monk.
Tuan paused at an unsettling painting near the end of the passage of two men staring with empty eyes at a lama teacher. “Zombies,” he whispered in surprise.
“I do not know that term,” Lokesh said. “Perhaps you refer to some Chinese god. But these are not gods. They are very old, from before the time of Buddha. Rolang, they are called. Standing corpses cursed with black enchantment. Their bodies walk even after the spirit has left the flesh.”
“Zombies,” Tuan repeated.
Lokesh shrugged and pulled Tuan past the hideous images. “When I was a boy, I was taught the secret of stopping them, and since then I have never feared them.”
Tuan turned with new interest. “A mantra?”
“No, no,” Lokesh said, distracted now by another indentation in the stone. “You just throw a shoe at them.” He kept walking, then stopped, speechless, in a pool of sunlight at the end of the tunnel.
They found themselves in a landscape like none Shan had ever experienced. A path lined by a score of terchen, the tall poles with narrow prayer flags fixed vertically along their length, led to a small white chorten on a high cliff that offered a view of an extraordinary valley.
They seemed to be in an inverted bowl, with massive mountains leaning sharply inward on all sides like crouching giants, so that much of the landscape would be invisible from above. Shan saw the smile on Lokesh’s face as he gazed at the towering, inverted walls and knew what his friend was thinking. The earth gods had protected this place.
A deep, narrow canyon emptied halfway up the wall at the far end of the valley, offering a glimpse of snowcapped peaks beyond. It was the reason, Shan realized, for the fierce winds that protected the valley from aircraft.
Below, each gleaming brilliant ivory, at least a dozen chortens, much larger than the man-sized shrine beside them, were scattered across the valley. Sheep and yak grazed along a meandering stream that wandered through the valley bottom. The only other structures were tucked deep under the lip of the overhanging escarpments, tidy traditional farmhouses and what looked like small chapels constructed near groves of trees and along waterfalls, places where the earth deities would gather.
The joyful smile on Lokesh’s face seemed to spread from ear to ear. “We are here,” the old man whispered. “The fabled paradise.”
The harmony was abruptly broken as Tuan, turning, cursed and sprang away. Shan spun about to see him sprawled on the ground, gasping and clutching his belly. Six wiry figures, all dressed in black and brown, stood in a semicircle, trapping them at the edge of the cliff. Five had old bolt-action rifles strapped to their shoulders. The sixth, a man with a deep scar slashed across his cheek, tapped a treacherous-looking club on his palm.
“Chinese!” he spat at Shan, then pointed to Tuan. “And mostly Chinese. We have never allowed Chinese in our valley.” He stepped forward and knocked off Shan’s hat with his club, which was carved with Buddhist motifs. “No, not true,” the man corrected with a cold grin, addressing his own men now, “we have never allowed Chinese to leave our valley.”
As the men laughed, Shan saw the red yarn tied in their long black hair. They were khampas, warriors of Tibet’s old province of Kham, whose leaders had died in battle shouting that khampas would never surrender to the Chinese. He stooped and helped Tuan to his feet.
“It is Commissioner Shan!” Tuan tried, pointing to Shan. “He stands in for Xie! The knobs beat him when he tried to stop them at the funeral!”
The leader of the khampa patrol moved closer, deliberately stepping on Shan’s hat, and paused in front of each of the intruders, studying them intensely. He tapped his club in his hand again as he lingered in front of Shan, then his gaze drifted toward the edge of the cliff, as if considering whether to just throw them off.
Suddenly Lokesh wedged himself between Shan and the khampa leader. He lifted Shan’s wrist to extend his prison tattoo then laid his own forearm along it to expose his own tattoo.
The khampa’s eyes narrowed as he recognized the gulag markings. He seemed almost disappointed.
“You must know our friends Yosen and Pema,” Lokesh added.
The khampa frowned and spat an order. His men sprang forward to tie the hands of their prisoners.
The trail across the valley was marked with carved mani stones every few feet, many of them so old, they were nearly covered with lichen. Their escort did not utter a word, only impatiently prodded them on when they stopped to admire a magnificent pine tree, then a grouse that sat in the middle of the trail, undisturbed by their passage. They had just crossed the stream on a bridge made of huge logs when their destination came into view. A temple, no doubt centuries old, had been carved out of a section of living rock that rose straight up for a hundred feet before angling outward like a cresting wave frozen in time. Painted on the lower wall were over a dozen large Buddhist symbols, and above them were half a dozen saints—so faded, they looked like ghosts. Small chimney holes, stained by smoke, and rectangular windows were scattered across the rock face in three levels. In the topmost window Shan saw robed figures watching them.
“I don’t belong here,” Tuan said in a frightened whisper as they approached, speaking Chinese now. “When they find my identity card, I won’t have a chance. I have to run.”
“You think you are faster than my bullet?” growled the khampa leader, also in Chinese, and he tapped his baton against Yuan’s ribs. The blow wasn’t hard, but it took Tuan off balance, dropping him to his knees. “Tie them with the milk yaks,” he ordered, pointing toward a tunnel beyond the temple whose entrance was surrounded by piles of dung.
Lokesh ignored the gestures of their captors, just kept staring at the front of the cave temple. At the bottom of the wall, partially obscured by juniper and rhododendron bushes, were shards of old statues. A dakini’s graceful arm seemed to wave at them from the ground, the eye of a Buddha stared at them, a dismembered foot rose up as if from a sleeping god.
The khampa leader cursed at Lokesh. As the warrior tensed his arm for another swing of his club, Shan sprang forward to intercept the blow.
But, impossibly, Lokesh was faster. He grabbed the club’s end and held it in a tight fist. “Do you have any idea what this is?” he asked in the voice of a patient teacher. “I know such carved clubs. It is a baton made for a dob-dob, a monastery enforcer.” Dob-dobs were, Shan knew, the policemen of the old gompas, charged with keeping discipline among the novices. “They were stern,” Lokesh observed, “but they were monks. This club was crafted as a symbol of discipline, not an instrument of violence. You dishonor it.”
For a moment, the khampa seemed chastised, but then with a burst of movement he twisted the club out of Lokesh’s grip and shoved the old man to the ground.
Shan bent over Lokesh, shielding him from the next blow as robed figures emerged from the cave temple, no doubt bringing more torment. It had been a terrible idea to come to the valley, Shan realized now, a reckless hope that was only bringing more suffering. The khampas survived in a harsh, merciless world. It wasn’t compassion that kept them alive.
Two of the men roughly seized Tuan and began dragging him away. Shan tried to block the other guards from reaching Lokesh, but the khampas just shoved both of them to the ground. Shan struggled toward Lokesh on his hands and knees but was kicked back to the ground. He forced himself up and was kicked again. More Tibetans were streaming out of the temple entry, following those in the robes, who now approached Lokesh and Shan. Lokesh pushed himself up, looking at them in surprise, but was shoved back down. He lost his balance and fell back into the dirt. As Shan crawled toward him, Lokesh began moaning, but tried yet again to rise, extending his splinted finger toward the strangers from the temple, who now stood before them.
Shan froze. It was not a sound of pain coming from his friend, it was hoarse laughter.
“Sing a thousand praises!” Lokesh exclaimed toward the strangers. The khampas hesitated, looking toward the robed figures, and did not stop the old Tibetan as he rose on shaky legs and approached the tall, handsome woman in brown at the center of the group, whom Shan had last seen at her father’s funeral. Lokesh knelt before her, took her hand, and pressed it to his forehead. “Ten thousand Buddhas rejoice!”
The graceful woman who was the leader of the purbas turned to her companions in confusion, revealing the little lotus tattooed on her temple. Yosen and Pema were at her side. “Do I know you?”
“I have dreamt it!” Lokesh cried. He turned to Shan, his face lit with joy. “She is the one, Shan!”
Shan eyed his friend uncertainly. “She is Dawa, the daughter of Xie, yes.”
“No, you don’t understand! I have seen it!” Lokesh exclaimed. “She is the mother of the next Dalai Lama!”
* * *
“I am honored to be in your dreams, Grandfather,” Dawa said to Lokesh in a gracious tone as they sat sipping tea in a small chamber off the temple’s entry hall an hour later. “I too have dreamt of many things. Spaceships and dancing yaks. I remember, as a girl, dreaming of a talking spoon that complained when I ate too much.” The old Tibetan had been doting on her, arranging her cushions, even insisting on refilling her cup. Although his announcement about Dawa had sent ripples of excitement through her followers, it clearly made her uncomfortable.
“There are rituals and signs and long examinations of the evidence before the reborn leader is identified,” she continued. “And our precious Fourteenth has many long years left to live.”
Lokesh only smiled.
Dawa looked up at Shan with an inquiring gaze. Her eyes were bright and intelligent, uplifted by frequent smiles. She had removed her heavy outer robe when she entered the temple complex, and wore blue jeans, Western hiking boots, and an old embroidered vest over a shirt the color of a nun’s robe. She had listened attentively as Shan explained who they were. “I was there,” he said, “when the Maos burned. You have a video that could be used against Major Sung.”
Dawa’s patient smile suggested she already knew much of Shan and why he was there. “Major Sung is a thorn in our side that grows more embedded and painful the more we try to twist it out.”
“He is no friend of Deputy Secretary Pao.”
Her brown eyes fixed on him without expression.
“You left that lingam for a reason.”
“You are very clever, Commissioner Shan. But you are Chinese. I was hoping for a Tibetan ambassador.”
“Kolsang’s family is held hostage by Public Security.”
Dawa did not know. She looked away, her face twisting with pain, and murmured a prayer.
“It’s true Shan was from Beijing,” a quiet voice injected.
Dawa turned toward Lokesh.
“But he was cured of bad habits in prison. It was the will of the gods that he replaced your father on the Commission.”
A smile lifted Dawa’s cheeks, sad this time. “Because he complains? Because he was a prisoner? Because he can name some Tibetan deities?”
Shan met her questioning gaze. “Because Colonel Tan, the hammer of Lhadrung, hates Deputy Secretary Pao.”
The announcement quieted Dawa. The purba leader and the handful of Tibetans who sat behind her stared in mute surprise. “We seem to keep talking about Emperor Pao.”
“I could argue that everything you do is about Pao.”
Dawa leaned toward Shan with new interest. “You can never expect to destroy him.”
“Of course not,” Shan agreed. “I aim only to destroy the Commission. He’s had many campaigns against Tibetans. They don’t all have to succeed.” Tuan, at Shan’s side, gave a small, exasperated gasp. “If I am not mistaken, that was your father’s goal as well.”
“Many eyes in Beijing are upon the Commission. They think they may have found a formula for dealing with all dissidents in China.”
“It is an experiment that deserves to fail.”
Dawa shrugged. “I would have thought you had learned not to aim so high.”
“Your father tried.”
“And I lost him. We do not know each other well yet, Shan, but I suspect we would be better off not losing you too.”
Shan became aware of movement behind him. The khampa leader and three of his men were positioning themselves on either side of the door. Dawa noticed his worried glance. “Sergeant Gingri is a cautious man.”
“Sergeant?” Shan asked.
“He served in the army, driving trucks at a base in Lhadrung, but he came back to us when he finished his tour. He and his men are our cats. Very quiet. Very clever. Content as kittens when there is no danger. But they lash out like tigers when disturbed.” Dawa turned and waved the khampas away. “You are our guests. We will eat together.”
They were taken down a passage that led deeper into the mountain. Lokesh hesitated as they passed several small chapels where nuns chanted before photographs of individual Tibetans. As Dawa gently pulled Lokesh away, Shan recognized the words. They were all reciting the Bardo, the death ritual.
The rebel leader drew them into a cozy room hung with tapestries where a fire blazed in a large brazier and food was laid out on old brass trays. Dawa asked of Lokesh’s earlier days and soon their small company was engrossed in tales of his years serving in the Dalai Lama’s government. When asked why he had not fled, the old Tibetan laughed and explained that he had volunteered to be part of the decoy group of officials who pretended to be meeting with the Dalai Lama while the boy leader was in fact fleeing across the Himalayas.
“You paid for that,” Dawa suggested.
Lokesh’s smile was serene. He had been imprisoned for decades. “I would gladly do it again. The 404th offered much fresh air.”
Dawa’s smile disappeared. “The 404th Construction Brigade?” she asked. “Tan’s death camp?”
Lokesh’s smile did not fade. “It took me years, but I grew to realize it was an honor to be among so many great lamas. I never would have met them otherwise.”
The words left a deep, melancholy silence in the air. Dawa wiped a tear from her cheek and embraced the old man as Pema appeared with a fresh kettle of tea. She was pouring Tuan a cup when she suddenly gasped and grabbed his wrist. “What is this?” she asked, indicating a patch of color on the inside of his forearm that appeared to be a smudge of ink.
Tuan shrugged. “Some old thing. A mark put on me when I was a boy. I tell people it’s a birthmark.”
But Pema seemed not to be listening. With a strange excitement, she called Yosen over, then the other nuns. Yosen pulled his wrist closer to the light of a candle. “Ai yi!” she cried, and quickly murmured to one of the other nuns, who hurried away.
“Who, boy?” Pema asked. “Who placed this mark on you?”
“My—my mother.” Tuan was growing uneasy. He looked at Shan, as if for help. Shan eased through the women gathered around the Religious Affairs officer. He had seen the mark himself, but never looked at it closely. On closer examination, he now saw it was a small bat with outstretched wings, a symbol depicting happiness on the old thankgas.
The young nun who had disappeared returned, out of breath, holding a thick peche, a traditional Tibetan volume of long narrow leaves bound by ribbons between carved wooden covers. As she carefully untied the book, Shan saw that the covers and the pages were worn from frequent use. The pages were not printed but hand-inscribed. It was a tattered, well-loved manuscript.
“The poetry of Ani Jinpa,” Pema explained. “Printed copies of this used to be in every convent I ever visited. I met her once at a festival. She had a strong and beautiful face, like our Dawa, but her eyes were like those of an old lama. At my convent, we novices would gather after classes and read them. Sometimes even here we sit in a circle around a fire with Dawa and recite them far into the night.”
“I don’t understand.” Tuan began eyeing the dark corridor, as if thinking again of escape.
The nun lifted the title page. “In honor of the happiness that so unexpectedly flew into my life,” it said. Beside the words was a little bat identical to the one on Tuan’s forearm. “On almost every page there appears a bat. It was like her signature, the symbol of Jinpa. It was always a mystery to us and now you have solved it. You were her happiness.”
Tuan stared at the page unblinking for several breaths. “It means nothing. A favorite symbol of some old nuns.”
“Not really,” replied Pema in a patient voice. “Your mother had been a nun?”
Tuan gave a reluctant nod.
“Her name?”
Tuan’s face clouded. “Jinpa. It was Jinpa. But there must have been many with that name.”
“No, there weren’t,” Pema replied, then read the first verse:
The Buddha is the mountain
Our stream is his tongue
My son stops playing to listen
Pure words from the lama earth
“This style of poetry seemed very strange to us in those days,” the old nun continued. “But it always drew us even then. We realized later it was more like the poetry of the Japanese masters. It is beautiful, Tuan. It lifts our souls.” As Tuan stared at her with a haunted expression, Pema began another:
Under lines of northward geese
We search for signs of spring all day
And laugh when we reach home
“‘To find a peach blossom over our hut,’” Tuan said without looking at the book. He had finished the poem.
The silence was serene. The nuns beamed. Tuan looked like he wanted to weep, not for joy but from the rising up of emotions long suppressed.
“We look for artifacts among ruins all over Tibet,” Pema continued. “Dawa has helped organize the efforts, creating records of what is found. We watch for Jinpa’s books. So far, only one of the printed copies has been found, partially burned. But before the gompa where it was printed was destroyed, mule trains carrying thousands of printing blocks fled into the snow mountains. We keep seeking the high caves, hoping to find the old plates, any plates. But some of us pray especially to find your mother’s plates.”
“You must be mistaken,” Tuan said. “Surely it is not possible.”
“Her convent was near Chamdo.”
“I grew up fifty miles away from there.”
“She had to leave when she became pregnant. There was a raid by Chinese soldiers. They impregnated over twenty nuns, all of whom had to leave their robes behind. It was hard for them. Some became beggars. But you were the happiness that flew into her life.”
“We lived in a goat hut at the edge of our village,” Tuan explained in a near whisper. “She did laundry to keep us fed. We would make little tsa tsas of mud and dry them in the sun to sell in the street.”
“You heard her poetry.”
“Sometimes she would write verses in the dirt because we couldn’t afford ink and paper. She was often sick, and I would stay home from school to tend her. Until the day someone from the county council came and took me away to one of those Chinese boarding schools.”
“You have her poetry inside you.”
“I have nothing of her inside me!” Tuan snapped, resentment suddenly in his voice.
“People search ruins all over Tibet,” Lokesh said, echoing Pema’s words, “and sometimes gems are found. You have built your own ruin to hide behind without even seeing the gem that lives inside you.”
“I am no gem! I am a goat! I am an abomination! I will continue to be an abomination after I leave here! I strive to be the best abomination I can be!”
The old nun fixed him with a patient gaze. “You are an abomination only because you think it so. What you are is the son of one of the most holy women I ever knew. She touched hundreds of lives and lifted thousands of hearts.”
Tuan said nothing. They left him alone with his mother’s poetry.
Shan and Lokesh gladly accepted Dawa’s invitation of a tour of the cavern temple complex. After the valley was discovered and declared a place of extraordinary spiritual power centuries earlier, monks had moved there, she explained, first to a small gompa they built in the center of the valley. But then an oracle declared that they would be vulnerable to sky demons, and they had to retreat inside the mountain.
Lokesh grinned. “He had a vision of helicopters and fighting planes.”
Dawa, who was clearly growing attached to the old Tibetan, smiled and put a hand on his shoulder, then continued. “There was a shallow tunnel here that they began extending, carving chambers out of the mountain. The first chapel was consecrated seven hundred years ago. The monks chiseled rock for centuries. We still find new chambers and secret little shelves with artifacts and secreted prayers.” They entered small chapels and teaching halls, then passed rows of monks’ cells before she paused at a heavy double door carved with ornate symbols. “Most prefer the main sanctuary, but this has always been my favorite.” They entered a long candlelit chamber lined with shelves, each packed with peches. The floor of the chamber was lined with thick carpets. Half of it was taken up with cushions and low tables for those who preferred the traditional way of sitting on the floor to read. The other half had tables with mismatched stools and chairs. She indicated the shelves nearest the entry. “A full kangyar,” she explained in a reverent tone, meaning the 108 volumes of the Buddhist scripture, “and the tangyar,” she added, referring to the 225 volumes of learned commentary. “And our Lotus book,” she added, gesturing to a table on which several modern hand-bound journals lay. It was the chronicle of Tibetan suffering, kept secretly at gompas and temples all over Tibet. “Twelve thousand pages so far.”
They gazed for a moment in silence at these, the most sacred volumes of all, then with a cry of delight, Lokesh darted toward the commentaries. “Tsongkhapa!” he called out as he uncovered the first book he pulled from the shelf, then turned and fixed Shan with the expectant gaze of a teacher.
Shan grinned, recognizing the prompt to recite the words of the ancient master. “‘A human body and the encounter with the teaching are frequently not obtained. But now we have them.’”
“Now we have them!” Lokesh repeated, laughing as he gestured to the packed shelves.
“I am afraid we may be here for hours,” Shan said to Dawa.
The dissident leader grinned and retreated a step. “When you are done, your quarters are just four doors down the hall. Your packs are in there. Nothing elegant. Straw pallets and yak-hair blankets.”
“No better place to spend a night in all of Tibet,” Shan replied gratefully, and turned toward the shadows at the rear of the chamber.
He pulled book after book from the shelves, losing all track of time as he immersed himself not in the teachings but in the books of poems, songs, and chronicles of everyday life in ancient monasteries and convents. A group of herders made a six-month pilgrimage after all the sheep in their salt caravan had suddenly died. A yeti took up living with an old lama hermit in a high mountain cave. A yak train was dispatched with fifty new volumes of scripture, a gift to the fifth Dalai Lama.
When he looked out the window, he could see moonlight on the valley floor. He rose, stretched, then lifted a candle lantern to explore the darkened end of the chamber. Lokesh was so engrossed in reading the kangyar, he did not take notice when Shan walked by. In the corner near the outside wall, the long rectangular shape of the room had been broken by an inset closet of more recent construction. Heavy timbers cordoned off the corner of the library. He lifted the iron door latch and stepped inside.
Traditional Tibet fell away. The room was packed with electronic equipment, including a generator that vented outside and a row of car batteries. He pulled the cord of a hanging bulb, and the room was suddenly bathed in electric light. On a central table, a metal frame held a sophisticated camera suspended over a peche. A small whiteboard laid along the top of the exposed page said Volume 798, Page 45. They were photographing the library collection. At the other end of the table was a ring binder filled with various pages, some of them plastic inserts with pockets for smaller items. Some pages were typed, others handwritten. As he leafed through it, he saw the grisly images of his nightmares, the photos of immolations, statements from eyewitnesses, singed death poems, and half of an identity card for Kyal Gyari, the herder whose file had been reviewed on Shan’s first day in Zhongje. Unlike what he had seen at the Commission, here was the real chronicle of the immolations.
On a shelf near the window sat a large radio with an antenna wire disappearing out the window. Shan twisted a black knob, and the radio hummed to life. Seconds later, a female voice with a British accent stated, “The time in Dharamsala is 2151. Rain showers are expected in the early morning hours.”
He stared in amazement at the machine. He had heard that Beijing jammed the American Radio Free Tibet broadcast in Tibetan but never bothered to jam the English-language version, since so few Tibetans spoke English. “World news coming up, but first our family news segment: Norbu wishes to tell his sister Kiri in Gyantse that their baby boy finally arrived. His wife is doing fine, and the doctors report the baby is healthy.”
Shan found himself grinning. Here was proof that Beijing didn’t control everything in Tibet. Doubtlessly mixed into such messages were codes for the dissidents and the exile government, but most were for real people finding a way to bridge the two very different worlds on opposite sides of the Himalayas.
He listened to the world news, then shut off the radio and, holding his lantern, wandered out of the library into the corridor. The tunneled complex had a mystical air. Most of the walls of the hallway had been plastered, and were covered with aging images of demons and symbols, not all of which he understood. They seemed imbued with strange exotic scents, like memories of incense burned centuries earlier. He felt very small, but very alive.
After several minutes, he discovered a fresh, fragrant scent and followed it to another small chapel, where a khampa guard was slumped against the wall, asleep. The door swung open at his touch, and inside the chapel a dozen people were circled around a brazier, its smoke rising into a chimney hole blackened with age.
“Lhasang,” came a whisper at his shoulder. Lokesh too had stirred from the library. “Dawa is being purified.”
Shan had seen the lhasang ritual performed years ago, in prison. The smoke purification ritual was used to draw deities down from the sky, following the column of fragrant smoke, to purify and strengthen the subject, who sat beside the brazier of smoldering juniper. The robed figure murmured a mantra, nodding her thanks as one of the nuns dropped another bundle of fragrant twigs on the coals.
The smoke shifted as flames spurted upward. The woman moved, causing the cowl that partially covered her face to drop.
It was not Dawa. It was Hannah Oglesby.