Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

They were in a prison without bars. Shan looked up and down the track between the houses. “Where are the young men and women?”

“The Chinese from the relocation office told all the families that their young had to serve the people. Sent to factories in China. I said to them we were people too, and they laughed. My granddaughter is in Guangdong now. She writes us once a month. She makes socks for sale in America. Works twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. Sleeps in a dormitory with two hundred other girls. She says she found an old temple and borrows a bicycle to ride there on her day off. She lights incense for us.”

Two young boys ran past, kicking a tin can, then stopped near the spigot. One of the women had fallen to her knees, crying, as another kicked the spigot.

The headman frowned. “The fools who built this place knew nothing about campsites. No protection from the wind. Hardly any water. They drilled half a dozen wells and they all went dry but that one. Clear Water, my ass.” He shrugged again. “They say they will leave a tank truck in the parking lot.”

“I am looking for a man named Jigten. He has a limp.”

“Which is why they wouldn’t take him for the factories,” Rapeche said. “His mother hardly has the strength to get out of bed. Her lungs are rattling. He does things to help her that she would never approve of, if she knew.” He shrugged once more and kept whittling. “We do what we have to do to survive.”

The hut the old man directed Shan to, the last in the northernmost row, appeared unoccupied. There were no coals in the brazier by the door, none of the carefully tended vegetable shoots that grew along the front walls of other huts. But from a rope fixed to a nail on the rear corner bits of cloth fluttered in the wind. Someone had turned their new sheet into prayer flags.

The flimsy door was ajar. Shan warily pushed it, and when there was no response he stepped inside. He passed through a small cubicle of a kitchen into the room that comprised the rest of the hut. Under the solitary window Jigten lay slumped against the wall, apparently passed out in exhaustion. Before him, an old woman lay on a pallet. Her leathery face spoke of great strength and determination, though it seemed to take great effort for her to move her head toward Shan. Despite her obvious sickness, her smile was welcoming. “We don’t get many visitors to our tent,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Shan offered the traditional greeting. “Tashi delay.”

“I should make tea.” Her voice was like sandpaper.

“I have had tea, Grandmother,” he replied. “I like your prayer flags.”

“Jigten worked on them all night, asking me to bless each one as he finished. I said that fat goat of a manager will be upset. But my son said once the flags were up the gods would make them invisible to officials.”

Shan reached into his pocket to extract one of the little clay deities he had purchased at the market in Baiyun and pressed it into her hand.

The woman’s grateful smile was broken by a series of hacking coughs. For the first time Shan saw the beads of sweat on her brow. She had a fever. On a stool beside her was a bowl of water and a cloth. He soaked the cloth, wrung it out, and wiped her forehead.

“I was on the changtang once,” Shan said. “I saw herds of antelope. They moved like the wind across the grass. On my last day a big one, an old male, came up to me. He looked at me with an apologetic expression, like he was saying what a poor fool I was to have only two legs, then he sprinted away. I swear his hooves never touched the ground, he was just flying over the grass. I still have dreams about him.”

“A chiru. His spirit mixed with yours. A good sign,” the woman said, then began speaking of her youth, when the herds of antelope numbered in the tens of thousands.

Shan was wringing out the cloth for a third time when suddenly he heard a sharp gasp and Jigten leapt across the room as if to strike at him. His arm was already raised for Shan’s jaw when he froze and looked down. His mother’s bone-thin hand was wrapped around his ankle. “We have a hearth guest,” she said in a chiding tone, as if Shan had just entered their yurt on the prairie.

“He’s a Chinese!” Jigten protested. “An official!”

“No, he’s something different,” his mother insisted. “He saw the prayer flags. The spirit of a chiru dwells in his dreams.”

Jigten sagged. He glanced upward, and for the first time Shan saw a plank laid over two cement blocks, the family altar. Sitting on it was the old bronze dakini Jamyang had given the thief. With a look of great sorrow he straightened and lifted the little statue, extending it to Shan.

“No,” Shan said, refusing the altarpiece. “This is her place, watching over your hearth. A protector demoness.”

“I think he came to speak with you, Son,” the woman said.

The crippled thief gently tucked his mother’s hand inside her blanket. “I could make some porridge,” he said stiffly, for his mother’s sake.

“I would be honored,” Shan said. “On my next visit perhaps. Why did you go to Jamyang’s shrine?”

Jigten’s head snapped back toward his mother, his eyes wide in alarm. He did things the old woman would not approve of. “Sometimes things just appear when you need them,” he said awkwardly.

“Why that day?”

The shepherd glanced at his mother, who stared expectantly at him, then frowned. He was not going to be able to lie in the presence of his dying mother. The shepherd’s words came out in a whisper. “There was an old cairn by the highway. A truck had hit it. I saw him down there, rebuilding it.”

Shan looked back at the old woman. He stole for medicine. If Jamyang had known, he would have given him most of the items on his altar. He gestured Jigten toward the kitchen before asking his next question. “You talked about outsiders buying cans of food and blankets. You were selling things to foreigners. A German man and an American woman. Where did you meet them?”

Jigten frowned. “We were working at the old convent, hauling debris. Two or three times I saw them there. Once on the hills above, taking photographs. There’s a shepherd girl with a scarred face who wants to be a nun. She watches over them.”

“Where were they staying?”

“They always came from the direction of the hermitage, with that girl acting like their guide.”

“What did you sell them?”

“Some ropes and food. Some blankets.”

“Where would you get such things?”

“Mostly from the Jade Crows. I do odd jobs for them. They deliver supplies to the pacification camps. Sometimes I drive or do repair work for them.”

Shan looked at him in surprise. “But the camps are run by the People’s Armed Police. You mean they have a contract with the police?”

“Sure. The green apes. They run the camps, they provide the trucks.”

He considered the shepherd’s words. “The Chinese men who disturb the farms in the hills. It’s the Jade Crows, doing the work of the police.”

Jigten shrugged. “Like I said, they have some kind of arrangement. The police prefer not to go up into the hills. They get bitten by dogs. They hear the phantom horns. They get hounded by ghosts.”

“An arrangement with the Armed Police,” Shan said, thinking out loud. “But not with local Public Security.”

Jigten offered no reply. Shan needed none. Those who had attacked Meng in town held Public Security in contempt. Meng had not only been attacked, she had lied about it as if she feared reporting it. He hesitated a moment, puzzling again over why she had been attacked. Not even the most arrogant gangs would risk assaulting a knob without a good reason.

“Our headman Rapeche made a protection charm for the manager,” Jigten said abruptly, speaking toward the shadows at the back of the room. “That fat one at the gate. He gets frightened sleeping alone in that concrete building. Old Tibetan ghosts rise up in the night to haunt the Chinese in this valley,” he added with an air of satisfaction. “He confided in Rapeche after that, said we won’t stay here forever. More trucks will arrive. They will break us up and take us away to Chinese cities. They say there are entire blocks where nothing green grows, where the wind is full of grease and chemicals. Then we’ll look back at this place as a happy time. At least here we still have most of the clan together.”