CHAPTER TEN

The gentle touch was like cool water over his burning pain. His arms and back throbbed from the beatings, his ears rang from the batons hitting his head. He sensed the trickle of blood from half a dozen cuts. But from the deep pit of his pain a voice called him upward.

“I am not afraid of demons,” came the whispered voice. “If I were afraid of demons there would be little profit in knowledge of things as they are.” It was not a prayer, but a poem from Milarepa, Tibet’s ancient poet-saint, about an encounter with evil gods. “How wonderful it is that you have arrived. Do not leave without making a nuisance of yourself,” the gentle voice recited, pulling Shan upward toward the light.

At last, with the gasp of the drowning man reaching air again, he awoke. The leathery, stubbled face that hovered over him smiled. He reached out and grabbed Lokesh’s hand.

“If I had known you would miss me so on my holiday I would have written,” the old Tibetan quipped.

Shan covered the leathery hand with his other hand, squeezing it as relief flooded over him. He tried to speak but only a parched croak came out of his mouth. Lokesh propped him up and put a wooden ladle of water to his lips.

“Are you well, my friend?” Shan asked after he drank.

“You know these government resorts. They tend to cut corners on meals and bedding.”

With painful effort Shan pushed himself back against the wall, leaning there so he could better look about. They were in a corner of what seemed to be a long open-fronted garage. Outside were rows of run-down barracks. “An army base?”

“Built as a camp for summer training,” came a soft voice behind Lokesh. A sturdy woman with a stubble of grey hair on her scalp appeared. “Abandoned years ago. Some of the buildings are only good for firewood.”

Shan had not worried about finding Lokesh and the nun amid the hundreds in the camp. He had known they would be with the sick and injured.

“My name is Shan,” he said to the nun.

The woman offered a hesitant nod.

“Ani Ama knows the healing ways,” Lokesh said. “They don’t let us have doctors.”

Shan turned back to study the building he lay in. The pallets of the sick and injured extended the entire length of the rear wall. A few of the patients, like Shan, wore makeshift bandages over external injuries. Most appeared pale and fevered. Some were shaking uncontrollably. Others wept.

He studied his friend, seeing now the patches of color on his face and forearms where bruises were fading. “Did they … are you—”

“I am well enough,” Lokesh said with a small grin, fixing Shan with a meaningful gaze. In their gulag barracks Lokesh had often been punished, usually for breaking discipline to aid an ailing prisoner, but he had never spoken of his beatings, never once complained. “You should not have come,” he added. “It is too dangerous. You have Ko to think of.”

Shan fought a new wave of emotion at the mention of his son. “Ko is not going anywhere. I missed your snoring in the night.”

Lokesh’s grin, made uneven by a knob boot years earlier, exposed his yellowed, uneven teeth. He gripped Shan’s arm tightly for a moment, then rose to help him to his feet.

Shan clenched his jaw against the pain in his shoulders and back, trying to push away the memory of the storm of batons after the police had pulled him off the statue. With Lokesh’s help he hobbled into the sunlight.

“There are too many here,” Lokesh said. “Twice the number the camp should hold. Not enough food. Not enough pallets and blankets. Not enough latrines.”

Shan saw only a few solitary Tibetans wandering around the compound. “Where are they?”

Lokesh gestured toward the largest of the buildings, no doubt originally built as a mess hall. “Classes.You’ve heard it before. Hours of lectures every day. Duty to the motherland. Beijing’s version of the history of Tibet. Learning magical chants from The Little Red Book.”

Lokesh led Shan toward the nearest barracks, pausing at the warped planks of the stairs leading inside. “Ani Ama convinced them to set up a quarantine, said the soldiers could all get sick otherwise. They aren’t real guards, just police.” Shan and Lokesh well knew the thugs who ran China’s hard-labor prisons. “Like a practice prison. Not even any roll calls. They don’t realize the sick rotate in and out every few hours. The worst of those who are really sick are in the old bunkers in the back fields. From there it’s a short walk to the graveyard. They’re just carried out in wheelbarrows, five or six a day since the typhus started.”

An old woman standing on the top step cast them a scolding look, then stepped aside at a murmured syllable from Lokesh. Shan pushed open the door to find more rows of pallets along the walls of the building. Except half the occupants were not lying on them, but sat with legs folded underneath, murmuring prayers as they worked their malas, their prayer beads. The end of the long hall was covered with the chalked images of deities.

“Ani Ama organized it the first day we were here. She calls it our secret army,” Lokesh explained, then pulled Shan back out of the doorway.

As harsh as it was, the internment camp was indeed not one of the hard-labor prisons Shan was used to, with strict regimens enforced with merciless brutality. He recalled what Jigten had called the place. Not a prison, just a cage with no way out. They paused at a hand pump where Lokesh worked the handle as Shan held his head in the stream of cold water, then found a seat in a decrepit lean-to, out of sight of the guards.

Lokesh spoke of his final journey with the dead lama as if Jamyang had been alive, recounting how the stars had danced overhead as they had climbed at night, how butterflies had often alighted on Jamyang, how the ragyapa, the flesh cutters, had shown him with great reverence a meteorite that had landed, glowing red-hot, in their yard of bones the week before.

Shan explained what he had learned since leaving his friend, though he could not bring himself to repeat Chenmo’s strange tale of seeing Jamyang on the highway.

“Did they get away?” he asked, “the ones with the abbess?”

“I am sure of it.” Lokesh nodded. “If they had been caught they would be here. The abbess is safe. That meteorite, it was a sign the boneyard is still protected by the deities.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward Shan. “Ani Ama told me there is a little hut at the hermitage where there are nuns at all hours, taking turns, always at least two, saying the rites for the full cycle.”

The full cycle. Lokesh meant the full forty-nine days that comprised the mourning period of old Tibet. “For Jamyang and the abbess. It will help them find the next step that is destined for them.” Lokesh straightened, then cast a faraway look toward the sacred mountain. “Up and down,” he said solemnly.

Shan realized after a moment that his friend was referring to the levels of the next existence, the next spiritual stage for the dead. The fact that Jamyang had taken four, that he was a suicide, weighed heavily on Lokesh. The traditional Tibetans believed suicides and those who killed suffered terrible punishment, then were reincarnated far down the chain of existence. It could take them hundreds of lifetimes to reach the human form again.

“They’re going to find the American, Lokesh,” Shan said after a long silence. “It won’t go well for her when they do. No one outside knows she’s here. They don’t have to account for her.”

“I have been thinking about that, about how many of the people here have not even recognized her as an outsider. Her complexion is dark. She cut her hair.” There was an odd pleading in his eyes as Lokesh looked back at Shan. “What if this was meant to be her path, what if she were intended to become a nun in Tibet? How many times have I heard you say you were transformed when you came here. Maybe this is just the passage she must endure to be transformed.”

Shan felt a melancholy grin tug at his mouth. He was so tired, so sore. He would like nothing more than to sit and soothe himself with his friend’s gentle vision of the world. “They will find her,” he said instead. “Someone will tell them. Someone always tells them. You know how it works. A criticism session where prisoners are forced to speak of other inmates. Or she will give herself away. She speaks almost no Tibetan. It is a miracle she has lasted this long. I have to talk with her.”

Lokesh smiled, then shrugged. “A miracle, like you say. And what was it that kept you alive in prison, my friend?”

Shan felt a flush of emotion as he returned the old Tibetan’s gaze. “A miracle,” he whispered. He turned away with a sigh. “I have to get her out.”

“She won’t speak with you.”

“Take me to her. You have to let me try. She could die.”

There was pleading in his friend’s eyes now. “Don’t do it, Shan. Don’t take her back to the death, to the blackness of murder. I think she is trying to become a nun. Ani Ama says the deities must have intended it. The abbess dies in an unexpected way, a new nun arrives in an unexpected way.”

Shan sighed and gazed out over the camp. “I remember in our prison how one of the old monks found an injured bird. Everyone else would have eaten it but the two of you made a little cage for it out of an old basket. The lama grew very fond of it. But when it was healed you told him he had to keep the door of the cage open. You said it should not decide its fate based on fear. You said it had to follow its true nature. The bird flew away.”

Shan saw in his eyes that Lokesh understood. “She can’t become a nun out of fear,” he continued. “She can only make that decision once she is free.”

Lokesh turned to Shan in silence. Shan had seen the gaze before. There was patience and affection in it, but also disappointment.

“Once I was being taken for punishment,” Shan said after a moment, shuddering at the memory. The Chinese guards had always singled him out for special punishment for helping the Tibetan prisoners. He had been treated as a traitor for doing so. “You told me the pain would never reach inside as long as I would just act true. She has to act true. She has to let me help her so she can help us.”

“What you mean,” Lokesh said after a long moment, “is that she can only be a nun if she stops being a nun. But that,” he added, “is not something you or I can ask of her.”

*   *   *

As he paced along the grounds Shan unsuccessfully tried to convince himself that the pain he felt was that left by the police batons. He cherished Lokesh like a second father and knew the affection was reciprocated. Yet every few months a rift seemed to open between them, a gap that seemed impossible to bridge. Once he had believed it grew out of Lokesh’s steadfast belief in allowing fate to take its own course, because the deities would eventually find the solutions to all problems, while Shan constantly wanted to challenge the course of events. But Shan had begun to glimpse something new. The hope of resurrecting the old ways that had nourished men like Lokesh for decades was beginning to die and it was Shan’s country that was killing it. Just as Lokesh had once been part of the Dalai Lama’s government, Shan had once been part of the government that was destroying Tibet. They were just actors on a stage at the end of time. A great sadness welled within him. Suddenly his fatigue was overpowering.

He sat against one of the only trees in the compound, which had been stripped of bark and lower branches for firewood, and watched life in the camp. Prisoners began pouring out of the mess hall, their catechism for the morning done. A loudspeaker crackled to life and began playing a favorite Party anthem. “The East Is Red.”

Shan leaned his head against the dying tree, studying the movements of the guards, the placements of the watchtowers, the intermittent activity at the main gate and the smaller one at the rear of the facility. His eyelids grew heavy, and he was unable to fight his drowsiness.

When he awoke, one of his tattered shoes was off. Lokesh was sitting beside him, mending it with needle and thread. At Shan’s side was a tin mug of porridge.

“That’s all there is for two meals a day,” Lokesh explained as Shan lifted the mug and poked at the thin gruel with a finger. It was pasty and granular.

“Sawdust,” he muttered in disgust. The guards were mixing the grain with sawdust.

Lokesh offered a matter-of-fact nod as he continued his task. “There is no shortage of grain this year. Someone is getting rich on the prisoners’ empty bellies. Not enough blankets, not enough toilet paper, not enough clothing.” It was a common aspect of most Chinese prisons. The guards diverted provisions to sell on the black market.

The old Tibetan pulled a thread tight, then looked up at Shan. “I remember years when there was so much sawdust in the porridge we could burn it. We made little torma and lit them for the gods.”

Shan offered a melancholy grin in acknowledgment. Winters in their gulag camp had been hellish, with every prisoner just trying to endure the cold and starvation for one more day. Despite their empty bellies Lokesh and several of the older lamas had used their sawdust-laden porridge to shape little offering statues and burned them on makeshift altars, as they would have with the torma butter figures at the temples of their youth. There had been many nights when the lamas had sat with one of their companions as he lay dying of malnutrition or typhus, often clutching his belly in pain, and watched the little flickering deities. The fact that prisoners sometimes died when the last of the flames sputtered out had been taken as a sign that the gods had not forgotten them.

Shan watched Lokesh as he walked back toward the makeshift hospital, reminding himself how much he had missed him. It had taken years to understand that there was an empty place inside him that could only be filled by the old man’s presence. For Shan, memories of their sawdust winters in the gulag came back in nightmarish visions of frozen bodies stacked like cordwood, gentle old lamas covered with painful chilblains and work crews dying in avalanches. But when Lokesh reached back to those days, it was to remind him that they had always been able to keep the deities alive.

They sat in silence. Shan forced himself to eat the gruel, studying the prisoners as he did so. Many walked in a circuit inside the wire fence. Some wandered in and out of the decrepit barracks that served as prisoner housing. Others sat alone, working their beads. The structures of the army camp had been laid out in a U-shape, with the mess hall at the base and rows of barracks along each side, facing what had been the parade and training ground. Behind the mess hall, past fields of weeds, along the back wire were rows of dirt mounds that had served as ammunition bunkers. On the doors of half a dozen of the bunkers were yellow rags similar to that of the quarantine barrack. Beyond the wire, down a track that led from the rear gate, was a dump and a wide, freshly dug trench over which vultures circled.

Shan followed the worn path along the fence. Sacred mountains had their pilgrim paths. Inmates always had their prisoner paths. He well understood the natural instinct of the caged animal to pace along the barrier that contained it, and the track along the fence was already worn to a hollow. He fell in line with other solitary prisoners, many of whom looked longingly toward the green slopes of the surrounding mountains. They were shepherds, and knew they belonged with their flocks on the summer grass.

Banners had been hung over the fence. EMBRACE THE SOCIALIST MIRACLE said one. Another, part of its adage torn away by the wind, said only PROGRESS AGAINST. Guards struggled in the breeze to fasten a new slogan to the wire. ONE PARTY, ONE PEOPLE.

He paused to study the complex outside the wire. A long administration building sat near the main gate, beside the guard barracks. Beyond them, at the end of the road, were two square buildings with loading docks, the camp warehouses where Lung’s trucks called.

A horn sounded, a screeching air horn that seemed to send a collective shudder through the Tibetans in front of him. A plump Chinese woman in a crisp brown tunic held the horn with its canister of air over her head, shouting at the prisoners, herding them toward the mess hall. Shan, not daring to let the woman get closer, lost himself in the gathering throng and was pushed toward the building. More brown-clad figures, some carrying batons, appeared on the opposite flank of the converging prisoners. Shan pressed into the middle of the crowd and let it carry him into the mess hall.

Rows of plain plank tables and benches were jammed closely together, pads of paper and pencils arranged on each table. More political banners lined three of the walls, large posters bearing the images of party heroes the fourth. Shan sat and found himself between two middle-aged Tibetan women who nervously watched the stage at the front of the hall, where half a dozen young Chinese men and women sat at a table beside a podium. The instructors seemed barely out of their teens. The sons and daughters of the Party elite often took such jobs for a year or two after graduating college. In Beijing they referred to it as missionary work.

The first speaker read a chapter from a book on the heroes of the Revolution, as the Tibetans listened with wooden expressions. Then a woman pulled a cover from a chalkboard and with a ruler pointed to each character of a slogan written there, shouting out the words. CHINA IS MY MOTHERLAND. THE MOTHERLAND PROVIDES FOR ALL. Then she spoke in a squeaky, impatient voice, demanding that the prisoners repeat each word after her. Fearful whispers rose around Shan. He studied his companions at the table, then the others at nearby tables. Some were so frightened their hands trembled. They were farmers and shepherds, rounded up, he suspected, not for something they themselves had done but for the transgressions of someone in their families or neighborhoods. Those who committed overt dissent were sent to hard-labor prisons to be broken. Those in danger of picking up the contagion were sent to be treated by shrill young Chinese in crisp brown tunics.

The woman ordered the prisoners to lift their pencils and write the first character of the slogan. Shan wearily lifted the pencil in front of him, then realized no one else at the table had done so. He suddenly realized they spoke no Chinese.

He quickly translated into Tibetan as other political officers began marching down the aisles with long wooden paddles. Shan wrote the first character on his paper then, as a Tibetan across the room cried out from being struck, quickly grabbed the papers of those around him and inscribed it on theirs as well.

“Thuchay chay,” the woman beside him whispered as an officer walked by with an approving nod. “Thank you.”

“Lha gyal lo,” Shan replied and touched the small amulet box that hung inside his shirt.

Two hours later he stepped out of the building, blinking at the brilliant setting sun. He walked about the prisoners’ path, lingering to study the earthen bunkers behind the mess hall and the graveyard beyond the rear gate. Lokesh was not with the sick when he searched for him, but in the shadow of one of the crumbling huts, sitting against a wall. Shan was not sure his friend even noticed when he sat down beside him. Lokesh was gazing at the compound, watching the ranks of gentle, innocent Tibetans being herded by Beijing’s hounds. With a wrench of his heart Shan suddenly knew exactly what Lokesh was thinking. This was how the end of the world looked.

Lokesh said nothing as Shan pulled him to his feet and led him to the long line where a watery noodle soup was being served for supper.

After eating he helped Lokesh with the sick in the makeshift hospital until sunset, then they settled onto a pile of straw at the end of the building. Moments later his exhausted friend was snoring. Shan moved to the deep shadows at the edge of the parade yard, watching the guards as they circuited the grounds. They walked slowly, talking to each other, often stopping to light a cigarette. The guard towers were not manned, although the patrols sometimes climbed up them to briefly scan the grounds with searchlights. It was indeed, as Lokesh had said, only a practice prison. Most of the guards avoided the bunkers, turning and retracing their steps when they reached the mess hall, though some patrolled toward the rear wire, lifting their guns from their shoulders. The bunkers held the dying, and were uncomfortably close to the open hole where the dead lay. He waited until a pair of guards passed along the rear of the mess hall, then darted toward the earthen mounds. If he did not find the American in the next few hours he might as well not find her at all.

The sick in the bunkers had no notion of day or night. He stepped down into the fetid air of the first one to a cacaphony of moans and mantras. In the dim light of candles he saw four Tibetans on pallets, the nearest clutching his belly, his face contorted in pain. The others were shaking with fever. Two women, one a nun, tended them, ladling water to their lips and wiping their brows. An old man, his face covered with sweat, clutched a deep blue stone in his hands. It was lapis, used to invoke the healing deity.

“How may I help?” he asked the nun. She cast him a quick weary glance and pointed toward a bucket of night soil in the corner. He stepped around the pallets, confirming that no one else was in the shadows before retrieving the bucket and taking it to dump outside.

In the second bunker he helped change a pallet and watched as a nun and her novice constructed a mandala, a circular sand painting to invoke the protection of the lapis Buddha. The tiny clockwork tapping of the narrow sand funnels brought memories of other such furtive mandalas, in prisons where men Shan had known risked beatings for making such images.

He was disheartened as he exited the bunker, painfully aware that he was running out of time. But as he stepped into the moonlight a low whistle rose from behind him. He turned to see a dim light in the entrance of one of the crumbling bunkers. It was Lokesh, holding a candle within a tin can into which holes had been punched. It was a prisoner’s lantern, one of the makeshift devices they had once used to conduct illegal rituals in their gulag barracks. Suddenly a searchlight in the nearest tower lit the field. Shan ducked and ran.

“When they find you they will beat you,” Shan whispered when he reached his friend. It had been one of their secret greetings for admission to prison rituals.

“They can only beat my body,” came the reflexive reply, with a flash of a grin. Lokesh gestured him inside and dropped a heavy felt blanket over the entrance behind Shan.

The bunker was in decay, its roof buckling, its air damp and musty. A rodent scurried in the darkness. At first Shan thought Lokesh had only summoned him to speak, but then he saw the low grey shape huddled in a corner.

They said nothing as they sat beside her, Lokesh on one side and Shan on the other, the makeshift lantern on the ground before the woman. She clenched a mala in fingers that trembled. “Ani!” she cried in a hoarse voice. “Ani!” “Nun,” she was saying, “nun.” Her eyes were wild with fear.

Lokesh reached out and took her hand. With his fingers over hers, he gently moved one bead, then another, slowly reciting the mani mantra, as if he were teaching it to a child, working her fingers in tandem with his own.

The woman, her frightened gaze fixed on the Chinese stranger who had appeared before her, at first seemed unaware of what Lokesh was doing. Then gradually, with nervous glances back at Shan, she began to watch the two hands on the beads. An odd confusion grew on her face, as if she did not understand whose hands they were, and her fingers tightened as if to draw away. Then she focused on the serene face of the old Tibetan and slowly relaxed.

They sat unmoving for several minutes, the only sound that of the quiet mantra and the soft rattle of the beads.

Shan at last spoke, using English. “Lokesh and I would go to the ruins at night sometimes. We would clean up some of the old wall paintings. In the moonlight sometimes it felt like the deities were coming to life.”

The woman reacted slowly, as if not certain she had heard correctly. It had been a long time, he realized, since she had heard her native language. She cast a worried glance toward the entry.

“I attacked a statue of Mao just to be able to see you, Cora,” Shan ventured.

She looked back at Lokesh, who had not ceased his mantra. Slowly she pulled her hand away. Lokesh produced his own mala and continued the mantra.

“Elves,” she whispered. “Rutger and I saw paintings mysteriously cleaned overnight, with little offerings left before them. We joked that there must be magical elves. Once, the abbot and the monks started a sand painting.” The American gazed at her beads as she spoke. “The abbess saw it at the end of the day and said part of it was wrong, that some of the deities had been placed in the wrong order. But the next day they were correct. Some of the nuns said it was a miracle, that the deities must have moved themselves.”

“The miracle,” Shan said with a gesture toward Lokesh, “is that there are those of old Tibet still among us who know the way of the deities.”

The American woman looked up from her beads and studied Lokesh as if seeing him for the first time. “Does he speak English?” she asked Shan.

“No. Lokesh says the most important speaking is done without words.”

The old Tibetan had his eyes closed as he murmured his mantra. As Cora watched him her expression changed from fascination to melancholy. “He was arrested because of me. I fell down when we were being chased. He could have escaped but he came for me. He saw me in a robe. He thought I was a nun. He’s here because of my lie.”

Shan was beginning to glimpse the depth of the woman’s pain. “No. It had nothing to do with the robe, Cora. You fell. You needed help.”

“And he is in this awful prison because of it.”

“Lokesh and I know what a prison is. This is more like a retreat for like-minded people.”

A spark seemed to flicker in the woman’s eyes for a moment, then faded. “People are dying.”

Shan nodded. “You and Rutger were right in wanting the world to know about such places.”

Cora looked up in alarm, seeming about to deny Shan’s suggestion, but then she looked away, back at her beads. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Rutger was the photographer. I was the artist who sketched faces. I began to do so on scrap paper. I have thirty pages already. I could sketch a whole book of the faces I have seen here.”

“You must do so,” Shan said. “Give them to the world.”

“I was going to wrap them in a cloth and throw them over the wire in the hope someone would find them.”

“That’s not what Rutger would want.”

It was the wrong thing to say. At the mention of Rutger’s name the woman’s face tightened. She pressed back against the wall, seeming to shrink before his eyes. Her knuckles holding the beads were white.

“You need to let me help you, Cora,” Shan said.

She shook her head slowly and began rocking back and forth.

“Please. You don’t understand the danger you face. We haven’t much time. It will be dawn soon.”

She seemed unaware of their presence now. She rocked like a small frightened child. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a worried glance. The risk that they would be discovered by the guards increased every minute.

When the American opened her eyes they seemed to have no focus. Then slowly her rocking stopped and she was looking over the lantern. Lokesh’s hand was facing downward, with his thumb and little finger spread, the middle fingers curled toward the thumb.

“It’s one of those hand prayers,” she said.

“A mudra,” Shan confirmed. “It is the sign of giving refuge, Cora. On the long winter nights when we lay shivering and starving in the gulag the old lamas would light a candle. One would walk with it along the bunks while another made a mudra. It was like a holy thing, like a relic brought to life. They would teach us to focus on it, to forget all else but the mudra of the night. It kept some of the prisoners alive.”

Cora looked back at Shan. “Gulag?”

“Lokesh spent much of his life in prison, because he had been in the Dalai Lama’s government.” Lokesh kept looking at the woman with a serene expression, his hand still in the mudra. “These are his words to you,” Shan said. “He and I offer you refuge. You can sketch all of his mudras. Chenmo will help. He could tell you of the old days, and of prison. It could be your book.”

“Refuge? No one gets out. They just keep adding more and more prisoners.”

“I need you to help me find out about the murders. You can’t do it here. I need you safe, away from Public Security. Then you can tell me about that day. You were there, weren’t you?”

She took so long to answer his question he was not sure she had heard. “I have so many nightmares I don’t want to sleep anymore. The abbess calls to me in the night. Sometimes I wonder which is my nightmare and which is my memory. It’s like I was there and not there.”

“You were there, Cora,” Shan assured her. “And you need to remember. For Rutger’s sake. You saw the one who did it.”

“You mean the monster. The thing.”

“The monster. The killer. Yes.”

Cora seemed to shrink again. Once more she began rocking back and forth. “Rutger says the colors have to be just right. You can’t just paint the old walls red. There’s a special shade like maroon, like good Tibetan soil. The Tibetans have pigments they save for such things. Prayer red, he calls it. I painted a gate with the wrong shade and he wants me to redo it. The abbess will help. She teaches me old rhymes for the rhythm of the brush.”

Shan’s skin crawled. A dry, creaking laugh escaped her throat. “The abbess found a patch of blooming wildflowers above the ruins. We’re going to quit early so we can take a meal there. A picnic, I told them. The abbess repeated the word several times like a mantra. Picnic, picnic, picnic. She laughed.

“She wanted to finish painting the cradle of that old wheel. Rutger was going to help her, though she kept telling him to go to the back of the grounds. Someone was coming, and he might scare the man. I said I would go sketch some of the paintings inside the little chapels.” Cora’s voice trailed away and she began reciting her mantra again.

“A Chinese man named Lung was coming,” Shan said. “Who else?”

But Cora did not hear him. She had gone to a distant, terrifying place. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “I should never have left. I had decided to carry the food out to the place with flowers. I saw the one come on his bicycle but that couldn’t be the one they were worried about, I thought. I sat in the flowers, waiting. They were taking so long. I went back down. They were praying by the chorten, I thought. That one didn’t see me. He is talking to them now, all angry at them. But they won’t speak back. He was bent over Rutger, I thought to help him somehow. He had a red rag in his hand. I thought they must have spilled the red paint on themselves. Then he turned with Rutger’s head on his knee and I saw what he had done. It was Rutger’s face in his hand. The blood didn’t show on that one because of the color.

“I ran. He called out but I was already at the back wall. I ran. I fell. I ran some more. I didn’t know where I was going. I must have run for hours.”

He did not speak until her tears had dried.

“You have to trust Lokesh and me, Cora. I will get you out. We will take you to a safe place. Not the hermitage, because the nuns are being watched. Perhaps the monks. Lokesh and I will get you to the monastery, to Chegar.”

Cora shrank back. Her eyes filled with fear again. “Don’t you understand? I told you!”

“Told me what?” Shan asked.

“I didn’t see all the blood because it blended with the robe. Take me to the monastery and I will die! The butcher was a monk.”