Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

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.”