Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

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.