The Commission studiously reviewed files all morning. Madam Choi, but no one else, took notice of Shan’s late arrival, and he accepted her chastizing glance without responding. Tuan, seated as usual along the wall, stared at him peevishly. The stack of files at each Commissioner’s chair was several inches tall, and Choi was determined that each would be reviewed with maximum efficiency. Her remarks were rote variations on the same themes, with certain phrases being repeated every few minutes as if in rehearsed rotation. Shan gave the other Commissioners as much attention as the files themselves. The patterns were not only in Choi’s words.
Judson tended to so often watch Hannah Oglesby, who peered out the window toward the blackened circle of earth, that Shan began to wonder if she saw something he had missed. The German Vogel kept pace with Madam Choi, affirming his agreement with her observations with nods and utterances of “Of course” and “Just so” between furtive glances at the demure Miss Lin. Miss Zhu, seated between the two Co-Chairmen, spent much of her time fastidiously recording notes when she was not translating. The middle-aged Tibetan Kolsang seemed to examine each file in detail though seldom spoke, and never before nervously looking at Tuan and Major Sung. Each of Emperor Pao’s puppets seemed to have his or her own script.
“I am pleased to present for the record the statement of the victim Kai,” Vogel suddenly announced. “He regained consciousness last night long enough for the team to obtain his evidence.” The German lifted a sheet and began to read. “‘I apologize for my irresponsible act against my country,’” Vogel said in a loud stage voice. “‘On reflection, I know now I allowed myself to drift from the motherland. My family were poor farmers. When criminals came from India and offered money, I was weak. I had failed to attend the citizenship classes that would have prevented my lapse in judgment. Reactionaries poisoned my mind and made me their instrument.’” Shan and Judson exchanged a glance, and as Vogel finished, the American leaned forward to ask a question.
Madam Choi interrupted by raising another file and speaking up. “Korchok Gyal, age thirty-seven,” she recited, introducing a new case. Judson shrugged at Shan. “Employed as a forest warden,” she continued. “Assembled a pyre of logs, soaked it in gasoline, then climbed on top and lit them. There had been rumors of corruption in the management of his forest.”
Shan looked at his folder, which held a photograph of smoldering logs. The charred remains by the ashes could have been taken at first glance to be just another burnt log. On the ground beside the dead man, not mentioned in the report, was a scrap of yellow, blue, and red cloth. It was, Shan suspected, what was left of a flag of Free Tibet.
“Forest guard?” Judson asked. He lifted the photo for all to see. “Look at the slopes behind him. There’s not a tree left standing.”
Shan examined the photo again, which showed several mountains in the background. The near slopes were scarred with logging roads and covered with stumps. The mountains had been denuded. In another year they would be eroded wastelands.
“The angle of the camera is deceiving,” Choi inserted. She saw Judson’s frown and added, “I have heard rumors of foreigners buying black market logs.”
Shan said nothing, but found himself absently sketching on his notepad. He had drawn the oval and crescent that Pema, the Tibetan farmer, drew on the floor of their prisoner wagon.
“Another poor Tibetan who desperately needed social services,” Vogel observed as Miss Lin refilled their teacups. “Change is inevitable in every society. In my own country, many factory workers have had to adapt to shifts in industries. They learn to seek help from their government. The Commission needs to recommend that social welfare and counseling services be mobilized.”
Choi solemnly nodded. Miss Zhu diligently recorded the suggestion.
“Who absolved them?” Shan wondered. He did not realize he had spoken the words out loud until he saw all the faces trained on him.
“Absolved?” asked Madam Choi.
Kolsang stiffly kept his gaze on the file in front of him as Shan spoke. “In the Tibetan world, it is a grave sin to commit suicide, certain to result in reincarnation as a lower life-form. So many of those appearing in our files were monks and nuns. Surely they would have sought some spiritual guidance.”
Choi looked to Kolsang, who seemed strangely melancholy as he nodded. Her brow furrowed and she studied Shan with new interest. She seemed about to speak, but instead summoned Tuan and whispered in his ear, sending him hurrying out of the room.
Shan shuddered at the way Choi turned back toward him, an odd satisfaction on her countenance.
“File Seventy-four,” Miss Zhu announced in a loud voice, and opened a new folder. “The son of a farmer who stole a vehicle and drained the gas he used for his suicide. His immolation on the highway to Chengdu stopped traffic for hours. He obviously was distraught after realizing he would be arrested for his theft. He knew the people’s government deals harshly with thieves.”
Shan was following the other Commissioners toward lunch when a uniformed knob grabbed his elbow. He let himself be led down a side corridor into the rooms that served as the Commission’s administrative offices. The knob gestured him into a small conference room decorated with posters of joyous factory workers. On one side cabinet, more than a dozen thick files were laid out, on another, samples of paper and parchment were arranged in a line. Major Sung, Tuan, and Choi sat at the table, staring expectantly at him, joined by a woman with a thin, severe face.
“Director Wu of Religious Affairs serves on a special task force,” Choi began with a nod toward the brooding woman. “She has come in from Lhasa. We want to further understand your excellent point about absolutions, Comrade Shan.”
“Some sins can be absolved,” Shan explained in a slow, wary voice, “forgiven by acts of great compassion and spirituality.”
Director Wu cleard her throat. “I’ve seen pictures of Western monks kissing the rings worn by princes of their church. Is that what you mean?”
“No.”
“Rich exploiters in the West will pay money to build church buildings,” Director Wu suggested.
“Maybe you need to recognize sin to understand,” Shan stated in a level voice. Director Wu looked at him uncertainly. Major Sung rolled his eyes. Tuan, seeming to enjoy himself, scribbled hastily on his notepad. “I knew an old prisoner who suffered great pain from broken bones that were not set properly,” Shan continued. “One day, he began rising early to clear all the insects from the path that led from the barracks to where the work parties boarded prison trucks. He stopped taking lunch so he could rescue beetles from where we broke rocks for a road along a cliff. He began whispering with a lama for an hour every night. One day, he bowed to the lama, then walked toward the cliff. He kept walking right over the edge.”
His audience gazed at him, as if expecting more.
Wu rose and paced along the row of files. The others, even Sung, watched her with deferential expressions. She was, Shan suspected, highly placed in the Party. “You mean these suicides knew they would be reincarnated as some cockroach in a Shanghai sewer.”
Shan stared at the woman, trying to understand whether she was taking him seriously.
“Do you mean they would seek words from a spiritual leader?” Choi inserted.
Shan sensed he was being trapped somehow. He slowly nodded. “Tibetans believe it takes thousands of births as a lower life-form before you can reach a human existence. The greatest fear of many is that they will die and have to restart that cycle.”
Wu turned. Party members didn’t wear uniforms, but they often had badges of rank in the form of lapel pins. Hers was a red circle of stars with a lightning bolt inside.
Tuan seemed to be the first to grasp Shan’s point. “Prayers. If they found the right holy person, they might be assigned a hundred thousand mantras.”
“Or that holy man might bless what they intended to do as an act of purity and not a sin at all.” With a chill, Shan remembered Wu’s badge. It was the sign of the Strike the Root campaign, the government’s relentless initiative to undermine and destroy the dissident movement in Tibet.
“Then they could die with a pure heart,” Tuan said. “And they demonstrate their serenity by writing a final verse,” he added in a contemplative voice. The others at the table gazed at him in confusion, and his face flushed with color.
“So this absolution you speak of comes from a high-ranking nun or lama,” Wu observed.
“The kind who would throw off a robe rather than sign a loyalty oath,” Tuan said.
Director Wu’s black-pebble eyes shifted from Tuan to Shan without expression. Then an icy grin grew on her face. She stepped to one of the files and began to leaf through it urgently.
Sung dismissed Shan with a wave of his hand. As he stepped away, Shan saw a map of immolation sites taped to the wall by the door, surrounded by notes and photocopies of singed papers bearing what Shan took to be more death poems recovered from immolation sites. On half of them was a crudely drawn oval with a crescent piercing its upper right edge.
* * *
Shan had no appetite for lunch. He wandered along the street that circled the town inside the wall, trying again to shake his despair. Sparrows covered the street where a bag of rice had dropped and fallen open. In what passed for a Zhongje traffic jam, three cars were backed up behind a delivery truck as its driver spoke to a pedestrian. He watched as a constable approached the truck and sent it on its way, then followed the policeman back to the little station by the main gate. He slipped on his armband and entered a step behind him.
The constable, a sturdy, open-faced man in his forties, hesitated, eyeing the armband, then pulled the door back open. “Public Security is in the central administration building.”
Shan pushed the door shut. “A man died on the slope two days ago, Corporal. What happened to the body?”
Township constables were the bottom feeders of law enforcement in China. They had little authority, few resources, and often just performed traffic duty and cleaned up after Public Security. It tended to mean they were also the least corruptible. Shan took a chair across from an empty desk. The constable did not hide his displeasure, but took the cue, hanging his jacket on a peg before sitting behind the desk. “I think you need to speak with that major from Lhasa.”
“I used to work in Beijing,” Shan offered. “I put half a dozen senior Public Security officers in prison.”
The corporal’s stern expression did not change, but his eyes softened. “Which explains why you were sent to Shangri-la.” He shrugged. “An ambulance came from Lhasa. We usually handle traffic at accident scenes, to clear the way for emergency vehicles. Funny thing is, Major Sung ordered us to close the road outside the gate.”
“I don’t understand.”
“From the moment that ambulance arrived to take the body, we were told to block all movement out of town. We weren’t being used to help the ambulance. It took a dirt track up the slope, never came near us.”
“You said ‘body.’ You know the man was dead.”
“No one said a word. No investigation, just some crime scene tape. No one said there was a death. Except the birds.” The corporal pulled out a pack of chewing gum and offered him a piece.
“Birds?”
“That ambulance came all the way from Lhasa. An hour’s drive. I stayed at the gate the whole time, pushing back onlookers, stopping all photography. After thirty minutes, the first vulture started circling. By the time the ambulance came, there were half a dozen in the sky overhead. Some say they can smell dead meat from twenty miles away. The birds don’t lie.”
“Another ambulance came the next morning.”
The corporal nodded. “Before dawn.”
“It brought the victim back from treatment.”
“A fucking miracle.”
A radio crackled to life, barking out the report of a traffic accident. The corporal rose, reaching for his jacket. “I witnessed an immolation last year, up north,” he declared. “I was ordered to help recover the body. A former prisoner. He had wrapped wet towels around one arm. Underneath was the only skin that wasn’t charred. He had saved his tattoo, a big one that ran all the way up the arm,” the constable continued as he buttoned up his jacket. “‘Fucked by the Motherland,’ it said. That was his death poem. When a Public Security officer came, he poured more gas over the tattoo and lit the arm on fire.” He opened the door and offered Shan a mock salute. “I bet that’s not in your Commission files.”
Shan followed him out, strangely encouraged by the man’s candor, and continued to roam the town. A small grey terrier with the unkempt look of a stray trotted out of the bushes of the little town park and walked beside him.
The thoroughly modern classless town, built to impress Tibetans, was fading into another kind of symbol of China in Tibet. One building near the north gate—residences for higher-level officials—had well-tended plantings and a guard watching two government limousines out front. On one side of that central apartment building were other residential structures, less cared for and adorned with dying bushes in concrete planters. To the opposite side were a handful of shops and cafés and offices, the municipal garages, then the warehouses that kept the town supplied. Even though Zhongje was less than three years old, its cheap building materials, designed and supplied by people who had never been in Tibet, were faring poorly in the harsh Tibetan weather. Faux marble fronts along the ground level of the residences were cracking. Paint on the town wall was peeling away.
When Shan looked down after walking three blocks, the dog was still at his side. He bought a meat dumpling from a street vendor and extended it to the terrier, which seized it and disappeared down an alley.
He passed the traffic accident that had called away the constable, then paused to study the best maintained and most closely guarded building of the entire town, a squat two-story brick structure that housed recreational facilities for Party members. Shan hesitated as he spotted a familiar figure on a bench near the front gate. As Shan sat beside him, Kolsang folded away a letter he had been reading and stuffed it inside his suit coat.
“I am not the only one weary of cafeteria food,” Shan suggested. He recalled that Kolsang was a Party member. But he had not gone inside the Party building, where much better food was doubtlessly available.
Kolsang forced a small smile. “Sometimes fresh air is more rejuvenating than a meal.”
“Some of the immolations occurred in your county.”
Kolsang’s raised brow was his only reply.
“Did you know any of them?”
“When I was a boy,” Kolsang said in a distant voice, “I would go with my father to the high pastures to bring the flock down for the winter. It was often cold and rainy up there and we had to sleep in caves or under ledges. He taught me to make fires with yak dung and twigs, but often I could not coax a blaze. Never strike the flint unless you know the flame will spread, he would tell me.”
Kolsang saw Shan’s puzzled look. “There were six in my county. I knew four. Commissioner Xie and I were present at two.”
Shan was more confused than ever. “You knew Xie before the Commission?”
Kolsang looked over his shoulder toward the Party house before answering. “I had known him for years. He came to our township on those periodic Religious Affairs inspections of convents and gompas. You know, checking for fidelity oaths, reviewing management records. Monks can be terrible recordkeepers. We were being welcomed at a small monastery when I noticed a washtub near the gate that was filled with gasoline. I was about to say something when a monk ran out of a chapel, carrying a flaming torma, one of those butter effigies burned on special ritual days. He stepped into the tub, shouted out ‘Long live the Dalai Lama!’ and dropped the torma. He lit up like a torch. He never screamed, never reacted to his pain, just stared at Xie and me as if we were the ones his death was meant for.
“The next day Xie and I got on the phone with Lhasa, said the government had to do something more organized about the immolations. We pointed out that some Western tourists had been scheduled to visit that gompa, and we had only narrowly averted an international affair. We had in mind something like increased consultation with the monks over their grievances. A few hours later, the Deputy Secretary called us and thanked us, said our suggestion had inspired him.”
“And the Commission was formed.”
“He said he would reward us by including us in his plans.”
In the silence that followed, the sound of clinking glasses and laughter reached them. There was an open-air terrace on the top of the Party house.
“You were there when Xie died.”
Kolsang took a long time to respond. “Xie had a bad heart. He knew that, and took great care. Medicine every morning. He had much to live for. He made a difference in the lives he touched.”
“You don’t think it was a heart attack.”
The Tibetan ignored Shan’s suggestion. “I said we should have a funeral. Madam Choi and Major Sung said we would, but they want to plan it, to make it special.” His voice seemed to have an edge of warning in it.
“Did you know Xie’s body is missing?”
Kolsang ignored him again. He watched a flight of geese overhead, then rose.
“Where would the body have gone?” Shan asked.
“There’s an incinerator by the municipal garage. Sometimes there is greater reverence in a quick disposal.”
“Sometimes there are those who don’t want a body examined too closely,” Shan countered.
“Don’t strike the flint. Please.”
“Was there a poem at that suicide by the gompa? You knew about the poems.”
“You’re a good man, Shan, a savvy man. Too much like Xie. Don’t throw yourself away like he did. There is nothing you can do. Pao is just a storm passing overhead. He will have his way with us, and then we can go back to our lives.”
* * *
The next morning, Shan stood in the shadows by Zhongje’s north gate, watching for the perimeter patrol. It was nearly dawn and the only traffic was that of Tibetans preparing for the little open-air market along the outside wall and the night laborers departing the town. As he watched, Judson and Hannah Oglesby appeared, binoculars hanging from their necks, bound for one of their early morning walks with nature on the lower, more verdant slopes. The moment they disappeared, half a dozen of the night workers converged on the public bulletin board where the government posted official notices. They crowded around one particular notice, and Shan saw now that another man was positioned on the bank along the other side of the road, keeping watch for the patrol as they read. Several of the Tibetan vendors joined them, then suddenly the watcher whistled and the small crowd instantly dispersed. Shan turned to see two constables walking along the wall. He stepped out of the shadows to reach the board ahead of them.
The piece of paper had been taped over a Party poster. He read the first few lines, glanced at the approaching patrol, and ripped the page away, stuffing it inside his shirt as he continued up the road. He wandered along the row of vendors, pausing to buy a little baked clay tsa tsa, an inch-high image of a saint, then slipped around the corner of the wall to examine the paper in the first rays of dawn. It was a photocopy of four more death poems, handwritten in Tibetan with names below each. He recognized the names from the Commission files. He read them with a shudder, remembering the terrible visions of charred bodies that had troubled his sleep since arriving in Zhongje. All of time collects to create this one stroke of lightning, the first simply said. The others were couplets:
In stillness and fire
I embark to the other side.
I worried I was nothing
but now I become a beacon to all the world.
This is how I cauterize the wound
Where I sever the world.
The poems held him in their grip for long painful minutes, then suddenly he saw the janitor with the stubbled jaw walk by at a weary pace and remembered why he had risen so early. He waited until the old man disappeared over the rise in the road, then began briskly walking toward the Tibetan village. Moments later he froze at the sound of running feet behind him, certain the patrol had spotted him.
“You’re going there, aren’t you?” Tuan panted as he reached Shan’s side. He was wearing a white shirt and tie. “I mean the town of ghosts.”
“I am going to Yamdrok,” Shan answered, glancing at the old Tibetan ahead of him, who had stopped to speak with a farmer leading a donkey cart.
“I enjoy a good walk in the morning.”
“You have Religious Affairs written all over you.”
“I’ll be with you,” Tuan replied, as if Shan were a disguise.
“Surely you’ve heard the tales about the wind fangs. Officials going to Yamdrok get blown onto the spikes below the cliff.”
Tuan sagged. After a moment he pulled off his tie and shoved it into his pocket.
“You were chastised for not knowing where I was yesterday morning.”
Tuan looked back at the Tibetan market that stretched out along the town wall. “Wait. Please,” he pleaded, then set off at a trot.
Shan busied himself straightening a row of stones inscribed with prayers, mani stones, along the side of the road.
Minutes later, Tuan was back, panting and wearing a worn sweater and an old fleece vest. “Look at me,” he said in a mocking tone. “The good Tibetan boy my mother always dreamed of.”
“You smell of Chinese soap and your shoes cost more than many in Yamdrok make in a year.”
“They’re American,” Tuan explained.
Shan studied his companion for a moment, then took off his gau, the Tibetan prayer amulet he wore around his neck, and looped it around Tuan’s neck. “Leave it outside your shirt, for all to see,” he instructed before continuing toward the village. The aged janitor had climbed into the farmer’s cart. As they reached a curve around the east side of the mountain, Zhongje disappeared behind them. They crossed a low ridge, and fields of barley came into view. Men carrying sickles and women carrying food baskets were moving into the fields, ready for the day’s harvest. On the slope above was a large overgrown orchard that must once have served the abbey. Half its trees were dead or dying, but the others held apples and apricots. Several children were running among them, gleefully gathering fruit that had fallen in the night.
“It’s like we passed through some gate in time,” Tuan said in a near whisper. “Not a machine in sight. It could be another century.”
Shan surveyed the landscape populated by farmers with iron tools, donkey carts, derby-hatted women, and adolescents carrying wooden pails of milk. “Time is a great deceit, a lama once told me,” he replied. “He told me never to trust those who marked it by accumulating devices of plastic and wire, for they tended to think they were better than those who came before. He preferred to live among real things, among those who knew no time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That was my own response. So the lama lifted a plastic bucket and said carry this, and you carry the chemicals and factories of this century. He lifted a wooden pail and said, carry this and you are the novice taking water to the first lamas of Tibet, or the boy watering the yaks of a salt caravan four hundred years ago.” Shan gestured to a man who appeared on a sputtering motorbike, heading toward the government complex, then to those in the fields. “It is one of the joys of Tibet. You can pick your century.”
His words quieted Tuan, and they walked in silence. Shan kept an eye on the old janitor. Tuan watched the fieldworkers. Tiled and planked roofs came into view, many covered with moss, below thin columns of smoke.
“These are the dreaded fangs?” Tuan scoffed. “Killers of intruding officials?”
Shan followed Tuan’s gaze toward a narrow gully that rose up from the road toward the summit. Spires of rock several feet high marked the mouth of the gully.
“One of the Tibetans who works in town said a dragon had raked the mountain with his claw,” Tuan said in an amused voice. “Not so dangerous after all.”
The infamous wind was not blowing.
“The danger isn’t in the teeth,” Shan said as he stepped to the edge of the cliff, “but in the belly.”
Tuan strutted to the lip and froze. “Damn!” he gasped, and stepped back.
A grisly glimpse of hell waited below. It was nearly three hundred feet to the jagged rocks at the bottom. The remains of a guardrail hung precariously on a jutting rock several feet below them. Bones of a sheep or goat lay on a ledge that jutted from the cliff halfway down. Tuan kicked a stone and watched as it plummeted to the bottom. “A truck,” he said, pointing first to wreckage near the cliff face, then a little farther out. “And at least two cars. I wonder how many bodies?”
The wreckage seemed to disturb the Religious Affairs officer. He stared at it in a brooding silence until Shan pulled him away.
The village was larger than Shan had expected, and surprisingly traditional for being so close to the prison and government compound. It was in its own way remote—hidden behind the mountain, out of sight of its neighbors, and at the end of a rough road that led to nowhere else. As they passed the first worn buildings, he saw half a dozen men who seemed prematurely frail—and then he understood. Yamdrok wasn’t ignored by the prison and the officials, it was used as a dumping ground. Former prisoners would often not be given travel permits, so they could not travel outside the township in which they were released. The men had been prisoners, probably for decades, and when they were deemed harmless enough, they were left to die in Yamdrok.
“Ai yi!” Tuan gasped as a ghost stepped out of an alley between the first two stone buildings. He stepped behind Shan as the pale woman moved into the sunlight. Her hands, arms, and face were bright white. She stopped to untie and shake the cloth that covered her black hair, raising a small white cloud. A young girl appeared behind her, a heavy sack on her shoulder.
Shan grinned at the Religious Affairs officer. “It’s the old way of making barley flour. The village must have a stone grinder shared by all.” He turned and greeted the woman in Tibetan. She backed away, urgently gesturing the girl toward the center of town.
He pressed on, keeping the old janitor in sight, pausing only to let a cart of firewood past before reaching the small central square, where a woman filled a bucket at a water pump. The old man chatted jovially with the woman for a few moments, then crossed the square and continued down a road that led to a solitary farmhouse.
“Breakfast,” Shan suddenly proposed, and led Tuan toward a building where men sat at tables in the cool morning, sipping tea. It was not so much a café as a smoky kitchen with extra seats. At the back wall, a plump grey-haired Tibetan in a dirty red vest tended a copper pot of porridge on a brazier. His uncertain gaze grew worried as Shan sat down. The patrons all stopped eating.
“Lha gyal lo,” Shan said to the upturned faces, then called for two bowls of porridge.
Conversation started again, though only in whispers now. A rough-looking man with a scarred face held up fingers on either side of his mouth and pursed his lips, blowing hard, his mimicking of the wind fangs raising guffaws from his companions. An old woman adjusted her chair to put her back to them. Two others abruptly rose and left the café.
Tuan frowned as Shan enthusiastically ate the coarse barley porridge darkened with bits of husk. “I thought you wanted to taste another century,” Shan taunted him. The young Religious Affairs officer winced, cast a skeptical glance at his worn wooden spoon, and stabbed it into his bowl. As they ate, Shan studied the chamber. It was very old, with vestiges of the separate world that had been Tibet. Old hand-sized prayer wheels with worn wooden handles lay on a shelf. A ten-year-old calendar with a photograph of the Potala hung on one wall, a framed photo of Mount Kailash, most sacred of pilgrimage sites, on another. A weathered butter churn stood in a corner beside several old flailing sticks.
Shan glanced back at the brazier and saw that the proprietor had disappeared. “What you need is something truly Tibetan,” he declared to Tuan. “Wait here. Don’t leave until I return.” He quickly rose and ventured through the darkened doorway at the rear of the room.
He followed the sound of dishes out the back door and found the owner washing bowls in a wooden bucket. The man looked up suspiciously, then brightened as Shan produced a currency note. “Please prepare my friend some buttered tea at the table.”
“At the table?”
“He wants to understand the whole process. Take a brazier to him. Heat the milk. Soften the butter. Measure the salt. Take your time. Make a ceremony out of it. Don’t let him dissuade you. His mother was Tibetan. He wants to learn her old ways.” Shan added a few coins to the proprietor’s hand.
The man grinned and pocketed the money.
Shan left the proprietor and followed the road toward the old farmhouse warily, wandering up a path that led to more orchards, pausing to sit on a rock to study the building. It was a very old, traditional house, its faded maroon walls badly in need of repair. A rough rock fence enclosed a small pasture adjoining the rear of the house where a goat and two sheep grazed. Beside a shed at the back of the pasture was a new-looking tarchen, a high pole on which a long prayer flag was fastened vertically. A strand of smaller prayer flags fluttered from a rope strung from the pole to the shed.
He admired the little house. Painted dragons, weathered almost to bare wood, were carved into the ends of the roof beams. A traditional sun resting on a crescent moon greeted those who approached the front door. Seeing no sign of its inhabitants, he approached and knocked on the red door, which was slightly ajar. When no one answered, he inched the door open and took a single step inside.
The old janitor, sitting on the floor before a bronze Buddha, seemed to take no notice of him. When the man finally spoke, it was toward the little deity. “A high-ranking official visiting my humble home. I should rise and kowtow.”
Shan cautiously stepped forward, then sat down beside him and rolled up his sleeve, exposing his prisoner tattoo. “You mistake me for someone else.” He bowed reverently to the Buddha on the altar of worn planks. To one side were the seven offering bowls of Tibetan tradition. To the other were butter lamps, several little tsa tsa images of saints, and two framed photos—one of the Dalai Lama and one of a monk who appeared to be in his thirties—taken in front of what looked like a monastery gate.
Shan said nothing more, but simply joined in the old man’s mantra. It was an invocation of protector deities, one that Shan had learned in a frigid prison barracks years earlier. A quarter hour or more passed before the old man quieted. “Few in this village even know those words,” he observed to Shan, curiosity in his voice, then he turned toward a shadowed doorway. “He is one of those Chinese Commissioners.”
Shan heard a fearful groan and a sturdy-looking woman, several years younger than the man, rushed out to stand beside the janitor, as if he needed protection.
“He’s Chinese, and not Chinese,” the old man said, as if to reassure her.
“I have brought something of yours,” Shan said, then extracted the key ring and extended it toward the janitor.
The woman’s hand tightly grabbed that of the old man’s, who did not accept the keys. “A lofty official such as yourself no doubt is entitled to open whatever locks interest him,” the janitor rejoined.
The words stung Shan.
“I was negligent in allowing them to be taken,” the Tibetan added.
“The Commission sought to have a reformed criminal in its ranks,” Shan explained. “After Commissioner Xie died, someone thought I was the next best reformed criminal. But when Public Security came to me and my friend Lokesh, we were sure they had come to imprison us again.”
The woman finally spoke. “Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“Where we live, in Lhadrung County, we seek out old religious artifacts and hide them from the government.”
The woman stepped forward and clamped a hand over Shan’s tattooed numbers. “Recite them without looking at them.”
Shan complied, speaking toward the Buddha. “My name is Shan Tao Yun. I spent five years in a Lhadrung death camp. My friend Lokesh is being beaten in Longtou Prison to guarantee my good behavior.” He looked into the woman’s eyes. “But he would be ashamed if I behaved.”
The woman studied him intensely, still not convinced, then sighed. “We have tea,” she declared, reluctantly surrendering to the steadfast Tibetan tradition of hospitality.
They drank with polite, restrained conversation in a kitchen alcove lined with faded thangkas, hanging paintings of Buddhist deities. Shan commented on the beauty of the artwork, but his hosts seemed not to listen.
“What camp in Lhadrung?” the old man asked.
“The 404th People’s Construction Brigade.”
The man’s gaze softened. “They call it the reincarnation mill.”
It was a very Tibetan way of describing what was one of the worst death camps in all of China. Shan had been sent there to die. He did die, in a very real way—had lain broken, sapped of all strength, with only a tiny smoldering ember left of his spirit. But the old lamas and monks had reincarnated him. “I had the honor of meeting many great teachers there, and of being with several when they departed this world. Later I met herders in the mountains who said they often saw rainbows rising up over the 404th.”
The old man reacted with a sad, wise smile. When they died, enlightened spirits were said to ascend on rainbows to the higher plains.
His hosts spoke more easily now. The man’s name was Tserung, his wife’s was Dolma. They had been married for nearly forty years, Dolma explained, and had lived in Yamdrok since their release from the top of the hill.
“You were both prisoners in Longtou?” Shan asked.
Dolma, then Tserung, exposed their forearms to show their own tattooed rows of numbers.
“I had nearly attained the highest rank in my monastery,” Tserung explained. “I took my final examinations at an early age. I was expected to become abbot, like the three generations in my family before me. Dolma was deputy to her abbess.”
“You knew each other before you were arrested?”
“No,” Tserung said as his leathery hand closed around that of his wife. “It was just one of the ways they had to break our vows.”
“Our destiny,” Dolma offered.
Shan studied the two Tibetans, chewing on their words, then understood with a pang. One of the ways Beijing had broken monks and nuns was forcing them to copulate with each other.
“One year on their chairman’s birthday, they released us and gave us a certificate saying we were married,” Dolma recounted. “It took a long time, but eventually we came to grasp the blessing bestowed on us.”
“We had a son,” Tserung inserted, pride flickering on his leathery face.
Shan looked back at the photo of the monk on the altar. He was scared to ask about the handsome young man.
Tserung seemed to understand the question in his eyes. “We learned about Chinese questions in prison. We taught him how to speak to those people from Religious Affairs. He got his license.”
“Do you see him often?”
“His monastery was Kirti,” Dolma said, as if it explained much.
“I am sorry,” Shan said. Kirti, a center for Tibetan protests, had been subject to repeated and violent crackdowns by the government. Through the years many of its monks had been imprisoned. Kirti was a name that appeared frequently in Commission files, for it also contributed more monks to the list of self-immolations than any other single location.
“Two years ago, he left on a pilgrimage,” Tserung said, “and he never came back. We pray for him each day.”
Dolma produced a bowl of fresh apricots.
“There is a large stone building on the other side of the mountain,” Shan said as he accepted one of the fruits. “What is it used for?”
Shan did not miss the worried glance exchanged by his hosts.
“It was built as a stable,” Tserung explained. “Most of the land for many miles was once devoted to the upkeep of the abbey. Novice monks would sometimes go there and recite their sutras to the livestock for practice.”
“What is it used for now? Public Security drives in and out.”
Dolma poured Shan more tea without replying.
“I imagine those sutras still echo there,” Tserung said as he gave an exaggerated stretch. “I worked all night,” he added, and gestured toward a back room of the little house.
“I will not keep you from your rest,” Shan said, then stood and stepped toward the front door as Tserung nodded his farewell and disappeared into the dark chamber.
Dolma put a hand on Shan’s shoulder. “Not yet. We should chat with the gods.”
The woman’s weathered face was lined with wrinkles, but she had the air of an energetic young novice as she led Shan to the first of the thangkas and settled onto the tattered carpet arranged before the images. “Om tare tuttare tue svaha,” she began. She was invoking Tara, the mother protector of Tibet, who was depicted in the painting. Shan sat beside her and joined the chant. After several minutes, she rose and seemed to wait for Shan to choose a deity.
With a deliberate air, he stepped to the image of Menlha, dropped to the floor, and invoked the Medicine Buddha. “Look to the patient in Zhongje with the terrible burns.”
They began the mantra and when Dolma hesitated, Shan inserted the name of Kai. She followed his lead. “Public Security says he is the one who burned on the slope,” Shan said when they were finished. “But he is not. You and I know the man on that hill died.” Dolma’s grip on her beads tightened. “Tibetans came disguised as herders to watch that old stable,” Shan continued. “The next day a man burned there. Those who run the Commission will say those Tibetans arranged the immolation. But I don’t think so.”
“A man. You didn’t say a monk. Everyone saw a monk.”
“They saw what the killers intended. This was not a suicide immolation. There was no audience to hear his protest. There was blood. There was,” he added after a moment, “no poem.”
Dolma went still. “This has nothing to do with Yamdrok.”
“The Tibetans on that hill didn’t come from Zhongje, or the prison. Nor from the Lhasa highway. They came from here. I think the man who burned was Administrator Deng of the Commission.”
A startled cry escaped the woman’s throat, and her hand shot to her mouth. “Surely you don’t know that,” she said.
“Do I have proof? No. Do I believe it? Yes.”
She was silent a long time, then recited a few more mantras before responding. “Did you see the little stone chapel below the orchard?” she asked. “That chapel has stood there for hundred of years. Long before Zhongje and the prison. Before the old abbey itself. The gods have roots there. They protect Yamdrok.”
“Nothing will protect Yamdrok if it incurs the wrath of Deputy Secretary Pao.”
The name chilled the room.
“By now he knows it was Deng.”
“No one has come to interrogate us.”
“No one has come yet. Officially, they would like to forget it, to avoid further attention by the Commission. Unofficially, they are furious. Pao will eventually learn about the Tibetans on that ridge the day before.”
Dolma spoke toward the deity on the painting. “All the prison workers were forced to go listen to a speech he gave last year. He is very young. Too young, I think.”
Shan turned to the woman with new interest. “You work at the prison?”
“Tserung and I are both janitors—he in Zhongje, and I in Longtou. They don’t trust the prisoners to clean the administrative areas.”
Shan spoke with a new, urgent tone. “Do you know of my friend Lokesh? He was taken there several days ago.”
“There was a man with grey hair and a thin beard brought in without going through the registration procedures, just taken directly to the stone cells they use for solitary punishment.”
“He is like family to me. How can I reach him?”
“The stone cells are not just solitary. They are for special prisoners. Prisoners who need confession, either theirs or someone else’s. Not all leave those cells alive.” She turned back to the deity and began invoking his healing presence again, but then inserted Lokesh’s name.
A shiver ran down Shan’s back. Dolma did not know Lokesh, but she knew the fate of those in the stone cells.
Shan rose, leaving Dolma chanting to the Medicine Buddha. He circled the chamber, slowing as he passed the back room. It was dark, but the light from the entry lit a solitary thangka on the wall inside. The fierce blue goddess Bhimadevi glowed in the darkness. Inside the chamber, in the heart of the house, was the she-wolf form of Tara, the savage protectress of faithful Tibetans and sacred books.
The sight unsettled Shan, and as he pushed the outside gate shut, he gazed uneasily at the house. He had learned much about deities from Lokesh and the lamas of their prison. The image of the she-wolf was almost never seen in modern Tibet, and not merely because the new generation was forgetting the older gods. In old Tibet, such deities would have been reserved for dark, hidden chapels tended to only by the most experienced lamas. In their world, the two gentle old Tibetans were secretly harboring a savage beast.
He paused, seeing the tops of the orchard trees, and found himself climbing toward them.
The little chapel described by Dolma was a tiny gem of a building surrounded by the fragrant juniper trees favored by the spirits. The lower branches of the apricot trees adjacent to the junipers drooped with rocks tied to them, one of the old ways of deflecting demons. The squat, sturdy structure itself was obviously well cared for, but he had the sense that it was one of the oldest buildings he had ever seen in Tibet. The abbey must have been at least five hundred years old, and Dolma had said the chapel predated the abbey. The end of each roof beam was carved with the head of a different protector deity. One wall supported a framework of bronze prayer wheels, each cylinder the breadth of three hands. The entryway was flanked by stone carvings of gods, though so eroded that only the graceful hands pressed together in blessing were still plainly visible. He stepped into the entry to see a simple altar of carved wood, with the traditional flickering offering lamps. An old thangka of Tara hung over the altar, but no other silk hanging was needed, for the walls were painted, every inch covered with elaborate images of deities, demons, and auspicious signs. He yearned to examine every one, and knew that if Lokesh were with him, they would be here for hours. But the presence of the deities today somehow brought an odd shame.
He retreated, vowing to return with Lokesh when their nightmare was over, then quickly explored the rest of the village. He found what he was looking for near its northern edge. PEOPLE’S HEALTH CLINIC, the bilingual sign on the run-down wooden building read, though the Chinese portion was obscured with dried mud.
Shan paced around the building. Its roof was in bad need of repair. A broken window was boarded over. The only sign of activity was a donkey cart tied to a stunted tree beside the building, its load of straw oddly dripping water. He tried the front door and found it locked.
“Only three days a week.”
He spun about to face a teenaged Tibetan girl, her hair in long braids interlaced with beads.
“Is there a doctor?”
The words gave her pause. She studied Shan, then glanced at the cart before speaking. “Not for years. An old healer comes now. For Chinese, there is a clinic in their new town.” She paused. “My parents won’t let me near there. The Chinese say they built the town to help improve our lives. But if that is so, why build a wall around it?” When Shan offered no reply, she shrugged. “I don’t think your friend is hurt that bad. Not yet.”
“My friend?” Shan looked in alarm toward the square.
“A man threw a bucket of water on him and thrashed him with a stick until one of the old mothers stopped him. But she won’t be able to stop the others. Take him away. He does not belong here.”
Shan turned and ran, then halted at the corner of the square. Tuan was at the pump, soaking wet, bleeding from cuts on his face and hands, but filling a bucket for a young boy. Several old Tibetans stood near him, softly laughing. A middle-aged man in the clothes of a farmer stood in the street, glaring at the outsider, a shovel in his hands. As Shan watched two more men appeared, holding uplifted pitchforks. The farmer cursed, marched to the pump, and kicked the bucket from Tuan’s hand, then pointed with his shovel toward the road out of town. Tuan began filling another bucket. The farmer began shouting angrily at him.
Shan took a step closer, eyeing the approaching men uneasily.
Tuan raised his palms as though to stop the men, then lifted the bucket and poured it over his own head. The boy and the old Tibetans howled with laughter. The others were not amused. One man raised his pitchfork.
Shan shot forward and pulled Tuan away.
As they reached the top of the rise outside the village, Tuan paused to look back. “You might have told me you were going to abandon me,” he said forlornly.
“I came back. You could have just gone back to Zhongje. That’s all they wanted.”
Tuan cursed, then shook more water from his hair and hurried forward. As they reached the end of the narrow gully that led up the mountain, a tangled knot of loose brush tumbled by and disappeared over the cliff. The wind was gusting around the fangs, raising an eerie moan from the cracks in the formations. Tuan, still wearing Shan’s gau, clutched it in one hand and grabbed Shan’s arm with the other as if suddenly weak. He watched the edge of the cliff nervously as Shan helped him across.
On the other side, Tuan took off his shirt and began wringing the water out of it. “When that man in the café starting serving buttered tea, I told him how terrible it was for his body. All that fat and salt. I was speaking in Chinese. You know, like a joke, like some of those stupid public health commercials they have on television. I didn’t think anyone understood. But one of those men did, and translated for the others.”
Shan looked back at the village. Yamdrok was one of the strangest communities he had ever experienced in Tibet. A mile from the prison, less than that from a brigade of officials in Zhongje, the village openly practiced defiance of the Chinese. Stranger still, it was allowed its defiance.
Tuan removed Shan’s gau only after they had reached the wall at Zhongje. “One of those men shouted out that I was destined to be eaten by the wind fangs, that I would enjoy the view before I hit the rock spears below. I think they were considering throwing me over.”
Shan did not take the amulet as Tuan extended it. “I want to see those videos.”
“Videos?”
“The surveillance videos from the day Commissioner Xie died. Nearly a dozen people were present. Surely showing me the videos would be less disruptive than having me interview them all.”
“You never stop!” Tuan spat. “You know you would never be allowed access.”
“Access is a relative term, comrade.”
“Sung would never approve.”
“He would never approve of you giving me the photos in my file that first day.”
Tuan quickly looked toward the town gate, as if someone might overhear. “You don’t know they came from me.”
“I do now. Sung never would have done it. Choi and Zhu might have known about the surveillance but never would risk interfering with Sung’s work. The foreigners likely don’t suspect there are cameras. Who else could it be? You are the one who provided my file.”
“Why would I put in photos?”
“Because you didn’t know about Lokesh when I mentioned him.”
“You mean your friend in Longtou?”
“That was Sung’s leverage against me. But you wanted leverage too.”
“Me?”
“It was insurance. They would scare me, maybe assure I was submissive. But more important, possession of such photos would be evidence enough to throw me off the Commission if I proved troublesome. You never thought I would actually act on them.”
“You overestimate me, comrade.”
Shan remembered the casual, almost disinterested way Tuan behaved around the Public Security officer and finally saw the answer in Tuan’s challenging gaze. “Everyone who works for the government kowtows to Sung. Except you. You treat a much older, hard-bitten knob officer like an equal. You work for Pao. Pao wanted the leverage.” He pressed his point. “I want to see the videos.”
“If Sung found out, he would be furious.”
“More furious than if I told him you had leaked his secret photos to me?”
Tuan winced.
“The camera does not lie. It offers only facts,” Shan stated. “Surely the motherland is not afraid of the truth.”
Tuan muttered a curse under his breath and shoved the gau back at Shan. “I have a computer in my quarters.”
A quarter hour later, they sat in a room that matched Shan’s own, looking at a computer screen as Tuan searched for the images of Xie’s death.
“I need your phone while you do that,” Shan said.
“No way.”
“One call. To the Governor of Lhadrung County.”
Tuan rolled his eyes. “You never stop,” he groused again, but extracted his phone from his pocket.
The call was answered on the second ring by one of Colonel Tan’s staff officers. “I need to speak with the colonel,” Shan said.
“Not available.”
“This is Shan Tao Yun.”
Most of the officers knew Shan, and most of those despised him. The officer took a long time to answer. “On medical leave. In Lhasa. Could be a month or more,” the man said, then hung up.
Shan had no time to consider the news, for Commissioner Xie was now on Tuan’s screen. He watched as Xie rested his head on his hands as if about to nap. Madam Choi raised a file, gesturing to the two stacks in front of her. Although the video had no soundtrack, he could imagine her well-rehearsed introduction of yet another case. Less than a minute later, Xie seemed to shudder, then, his eyes still open, his head slid along his arm onto the table. Tuan played the video again, in slow motion and fast forward. Drowsy. Shudder. Death. There seemed to be nothing more, no unexpected movement from those around him. Kolsang on one side and Vogel on the other did nothing but turn the pages in the files before them until jumping up in alarm when Zhu pointed at Xie, just before Xie’s head hit the table.
“Who would want him dead?” Shan abruptly asked.
Tuan hesitated a moment too long. “Don’t be ridiculous. He had a heart attack. It was his time.”
Shan looked up, trying to understand what he had seen. On a shelf above Tuan’s computer were postcards and figures that looked like souvenirs. A porcelain panda, a plastic woman in a grass skirt, a ceramic Buddha, a die-cast sports car, and a plastic figure of the red-suited Westerner called Santa Claus. “Whom did he argue with?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
Tuan looked longingly toward the door as if thinking of bolting from his own room. Shan put a hand on his arm. “Whom did he disagree with?”
“Madam Choi was frustrated with him. He asked more questions than anyone else about the files. He wanted direct interviews with the families of victims. Sometimes Kolsang joined him in the arguments. She said the Commissioners were inexperienced at processing and assessing evidence, that that was the job of Public Security experts, who used all the modern techniques. She said he impeded efficient processing of the cases.”
“Was there a confrontation?”
“More like a self-criticism session, just among the Chinese members. She said he was embarrassing the motherland. He said we must look beyond the papers.”
“Beyond the papers?”
Tuan shrugged. “He reminded her that the Commission had to take a vote to support its final recommendations she seemed to take it like a threat.”
“When was that?”
“Two days before—” Tuan gestured to the screen. “—before this.”
“And the next day?”
“He and Kolsang were silent until after the session. Only the Americans asked questions.”
Shan stared in frustration at the screen. “Take it back five minutes.” They tried five minutes earlier, then another five, then Shan had Tuan play the session from its start, at high speed.
The pattern was identical to the meetings Shan had attended. Miss Lin and the other attendants straightened the chamber and set up cups and thermoses with tea. Madam Choi and Administrator Deng arrived, followed a few minutes later by Kolsang and Zhu, then Tuan escorted in the Western members. Sung appeared and sat in his usual chair at the wall. Shan took over the computer and replayed the events, trying to understand what nagged him.
“Sung,” he suddenly said. “He was Administrator Deng’s replacement. Except the Administrator didn’t leave until three days after Xie died.”
Tuan stared at the screen with an uncertain expression. “Sung is a major of Public Security. He probably had business in Zhongje. He can go wherever he wishes.”
“He wished to sit in a dull Commission meeting?”
“There’re foreigners involved.” Tuan seemed to reconsider his words and cast an awkward glance at Shan.
“There’re foreigners involved,” Shan echoed. The Commission was all about the foreigners. The government was performing for the foreigners, though he still wasn’t sure whom the foreigners were performing for.
“There—” Shan said, pointing to the screen. “Lin pours two cups of tea and gives them to Deng. But first she turns.” He backed up the video. “Watch carefully,” he said to Tuan. Lin poured the two cups, then set them down and turned her back to the camera for several seconds, obscuring the cups. She then handed one cup to Deng, nodding at him, hesitating before extending the second to his right hand. “Why one cup at a time?” Shan asked. “Why nod like that? She knew about the cameras and deliberately turned so as not to be seen, but only for seconds.” They watched as Deng sat beside Xie, pushing the cup in his left hand toward him before leaning over to speak and lifting his own cup as if in salute.
“Just a gesture of goodwill,” Tuan offered. “Xie and Deng had argued the day before, after the Commission adjourned.”
“Argued?”
“Just like the argument with Choi. Xie kept insisting they were moving too fast, that to be objective they needed to hear other evidence, not files prepared by the same Public Security investigators in every case. Kolsang joined in, taking Xie’s side.”
“But Kolsang never says anything.”
“He did before Xie died. They argued with Deng. At the end, Deng seemed strangely sad. He said think of the consequences, then he begged Xie to stop, but Xie said it was his duty not to stop.”
Shan advanced the tape. The meeting started. Deng left the room, but Sung stayed in his chair along the wall, watching Xie. Several files were reviewed, but the major kept watching Xie, who seemed to have a heated discussion with Madam Choi over one particular file. Choi closed the file in front of her. Then Tuan on the tape leaned over his chair, hanging his head toward the floor. Xie drank his tea, cradled his head, and died. “It was the tea. Lin put something in the tea, and Deng delivered it. Then Deng was killed.”
Tuan’s head snapped up. “Ridiculous. He is on family leave. An emergency at home. You want to see crimes everywhere,” he said. “It’s a sickness you have. A psychological condition.” There was no protest in his voice, only fatigue.
Shan replayed the tape. While Choi and Xie had argued, Tuan seemed forlorn. “What was the file they argued over?”
“Commissioners don’t argue. They clarify.”
“You were there. What was the file?”
Tuan grew strangely quiet. “Another dead monk.”
Shan took a piece of paper from his pocket, the list of burn victims he had taken from the hospital databases. “Check that list against current databases. One will be missing. Tell me what name it is.”
Tuan nodded but did not take his eyes off the screen. “He drank the gasoline before dousing himself with it.”
Shan studied Tuan, surprised not at the words but the whisper with which they were spoken. He played back the video, watching Tuan’s image again. “You kept looking at the floor when they discussed that last file. You were troubled.” He looked at the little Buddha on the shelf. “What was the monk’s name?”
“Why would I—?” Tuan saw the challenge in Shan’s eyes and then looked at the Buddha himself. “Togme was his name. I told you. We are encouraged to experience life in a monastery as part of our training. Like a secondment”
“My God. You knew him.”
“He was the monk assigned to me. We studied together. We became friends. He was allowed time off with me, and we visited some old shrines. He would go out with me and let me drink. He would never drink. He said I was one of those who would never grasp the evils of the world without participating in them.”
Shan was not sure he understood. “You mean you asked to go to the gompa?”
“The Bureau was pleased that I volunteered, said it showed patriotic commitment to endure such a sacrifice for the motherland. My mother was still alive, but very sick. I thought it would cheer her up. She said I had a destiny with the monks, that she was going to die happy. She did die that year, thinking I was going to become a monk after all.” Tuan looked up with a melancholy smile, and it seemed to Shan in that moment he was just another confused Tibetan youth. “I memorized a dozen sutras. Togme said I was the best student he had ever seen, that if I gave it another year, I could sit for the exams. He said I had been a novice monk all my life and never known it. I never understood what he meant by that.”
“He wanted you to stay. But you left.”
“There were weeks when I thought they had forgotten me, that I could just remain there. They came unexpectedly one day. A black car with a red flag on its fender and two men in suits. They intercepted me in a chapel and pulled me away. They made me take off my robe right there, in the courtyard, and put on a suit as all the monks watched. Togme tried to stop them, and they beat him.” Tuan gestured to the figurine on the shelf. “He pressed that little Buddha into my palm just before I got in the car. I didn’t open my hand for an hour. The Buddha had his blood on it.”
“What happened to Togme?”
Tuan clamped his hand over his shirt pocket. “He fell under the influence of the radicals. There was a police outpost by the front gate. Just before dawn one day last summer, the fool sat down outside it as if to meditate, then drank a glass of gasoline and poured a can of it over his robe before lighting it on fire.”
“Why drink it?” Shan asked after a painful silence.
Tuan’s voice was a whisper again. “Sometimes those who just douse themselves survive. Living in a shriveled scarred body in a prison ward, screaming in pain, but never getting pain medication. Drinking it guarantees you will die. I saw the report on Togme. When the flames hit his belly, it exploded from within.”
“The authorities knew of your connection to him?”
Tuan looked down at the table, his face clouding. “Of course. I explained how he was an unrepentant reactionary who secretly nurtured traitorous thoughts, that from the first I suspected him of contact with agitators in Dharamsala.”
“You mean the government in exile.”
Tuan kept his hand pressed against his pocket. “They like to call themselves purbas, those dissidents still in Tibet. You know, like the ritual dagger that cuts through delusion. But the government prefers the term outside agitators. A well-balanced report sprinkles in other terms to show the writer grasps the subtleties of political discourse. Fugitive traitors. Hooligans from outside the motherland. They like that one. There can’t be a Tibetan government in exile when there is no such thing as Tibet.”
They. Tuan, the energetic agent for Emperor Pao, always kept his distance. “You mean you just write what the officials want to hear.”
Tuan looked up in genuine surprise. “I work for them. They have made my life possible. Otherwise, I’d be herding sheep on some godforsaken mountain no one ever heard of.”
“But you don’t tell them everything.”
A mischievous grin spread on Tuan’s face. “The Party tells us we live in a socialist economy with market characteristics. I take into account supply and demand. If you tell everything, you destroy your market. Fifty percent, that’s my rule. Tell them half.”
“So you told them Togme was an unrepentant reactionary but not that he was a treasured friend.”
Tuan kept staring at the table. He did not object when Shan pulled his hand away from his pocket and extracted the slip of paper inside. Suddenly Shan realized he had missed what may be the most important question. “You could have just put the photos in my file that day. But you added the poems, the poems that are distributed by the dissidents. The poems that don’t officially exist. Why?”
When Tuan said nothing, Shan answered for him. “Because you never take a side. Because that monk inside you thinks the poems reveal something else at work in the suicides, just as important as the political side. Because you thought if I was like Xie, I might do something about them.”
“They’re getting secretly pinned to walls and bulletin boards all over town,” Tuan said. “All over Lhasa too. Always only in Tibetan. More and more every week. Zhu says nineteen, but it’s more.” He cast a self-conscious glance at the Buddha. “I pulled it from his file,” Tuan said as he handed the paper to Shan. “No one else cared about it. I keep asking myself, what if he turned against the government because of me? He was always so calm, but that day because of me he resisted for the first time and they beat him.”
Shan unfolded the paper. It was another death poem. We are taught not to hate our enemies, it said, but no one taught our enemies.