Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Inside, she unfolded the computer on the workbench. The screen burst to life and she began tapping on the keyboard. A moment later, a scanned document appeared, in Jamyang’s familiar handwriting.

“Two dozen pages in all,” the woman said, showing him how to scan through the pages. “Some pinned together, some pages of different sizes, like he was just writing on whatever paper was available.”

It was not really a journal, Shan saw as he skimmed through the pages, but notes, random entries of life in the valley, of work on his shrine and the deities they uncovered with their cleaning brushes. One page was just a list of Tibetan gods and their protector demons. He pointed to a smudge of color in the top-left corner of the page. “What is this?”

Sansan ran the cursor over the page and tapped another key, magnifying the image. A Tibetan chorten was revealed in pale red ink, with a heavy hammer imposed over it.

A grim silence descended over them.

Shan rubbed the ache at his forehead. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he whispered uneasily “He was using whatever paper he could find.”

“A sacred Tibetan sign under a symbol of the Communist Party. Where would he find such paper?”

Shan did not answer. “What did Jamyang say when he gave this to your father?” he asked.

“Only that it was important. Or more exactly,” she said, as if correcting herself, “that one day it might become important. Later he told me I should scan it into my computer, just in case. I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except-”

Shan completed her sentence. “Except he died.” He scrolled to the final page. It was a list of artifacts. A ritual dagger with a ruby in its pommel. A bronze trumpet. Three ritual masks with a detailed description of the demons they represented. He knew them. They were from the convent ruins, the very artifacts he and Lokesh had shown to Jamyang, artifacts Jamyang had helped clean and hide.

He slowly searched through the other pages. There were lists of ceremonies conducted by monks and nuns in the valley, with dates for each, as well as lists of shrines, most of them publicly known but some secret. There was a sketch of four young Tibetans blowing a long duncheng horn, with the caption “Sound of Freedom.” One page, obviously written in ink and pencil at different times, listed the names of monks and lamas under the heading “Chegar gompa.” Years had been written by many of the names, some as far back as three decades, some as recent as the year before. At the bottom of the page were three names with a circle around them. Abbot Norbu and his two attendants Dakpo and Trinle.

One day these pages would become important. “What was it your father and Jamyang spoke of when they were together?” he asked.

“History. Literature. Jamyang would translate some of the old Tibetan poems into Chinese. Sometimes they would speak of their own histories. My father’s teaching career. How we were accused and sent here. Jamyang liked to speak of his boyhood on a farm in the mountains north of here.”

“Did he ever speak of his recent past?”

“Not that I ever heard. We always understood he was a lama, a senior teacher. So he would have started as a monk at an early age, my father said.” She hesitated. “There was one night when a truck filled with Tibetans bound for one of the camps passed by the little grove of trees where we sat. Jamyang was sitting with us outside. He grew very sad. After a long silence he asked my father if he thought a man would be punished in this life for sins of his past life. My father just laughed and said Jamyang was confusing him for another lama.”

Shan paused at the last page. It read like a prayer, or a eulogy. “So young to pass,” it said, “so confused a spirit that is brought up with violence. You grew up in forests of bamboo and die among trees of flags. One hand on the knife, the other searching for your heart. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see.” Shan read it again, and again, each time growing more disturbed. It was about the Lung boy, whose body had scared Jamyang so. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see. Jamyang had known the killer was a monk.

They were not the last words on the page. At the very bottom, in a different ink, written later, were four more words. “Kaliyuga,” it said. “It has arrived.” The grief that surged within Shan as he read them was as real as that he had felt when he had held the lama’s dead body. Kaliyuga was the Tibetan word for the end of time. Jamyang had known that at least the end of his time had come.

“When was it?” he asked after a long moment, “when did he bring this to you?”

“Two or three weeks ago. He always came in the night. He brought incense sometimes.”

“Incense?”

Sansan gave a sad smile. “He knew I was often sick. Sometimes I cough and can’t stop for several minutes. He brought things, some from the old convent. I said we couldn’t take such things, but he said they were safer with us than in the ruins, that I needed them more.”

“Sansan, I don’t understand.”

She glanced at the door of the little shed, then stepped to the side wall and began lifting away planks. A double wall had been erected, a second row of planks that would be enough for a casual searcher to miss the narrow space they concealed. “Father at first kept his special things here, before entrusting them to Jamyang. The first time Jamyang gave us artifacts we just set them on the little shelf inside the compartment. Later he said he had a better idea. He worked in here alone one night, then brought me in holding a candle, and had me sit on the old rug.” She indicated a tattered piece of carpet, that looked like an artifact itself, then pulled away the final planks and held up her light.

Jamyang had built Sansan a shrine. On the lower shelf were offering bowls, several deity figures, and an incense burner. Above them was a faded, but still elegant thangka, a painting of the lapis god Menlha, the deity invoked for healing. In his left hand the blue deity held a bowl of nectar, the universal cure.

“He knew I was having a hard time getting my medicine,” Sansan whispered. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “He said this belonged to his uncle, who was a healer and who was known for making special cures out of gemstones and herbs. He said he wished he had such skills but that he did at least know no medicine would work unless the spirit was ready to accept it. He said I should light incense here each day and gaze at the lapis god. He said not to be shy about breathing in the incense, that in smoke and mist were where humans and god meet, that if I could awake the god then some of the nectar would enter my body.”

They stood silently in front of the altar. Shan realized he was meditating not so much on the deity as on Jamyang. The only time he had ever heard of the lama speaking of family was to this quiet, spirited Chinese girl. The words he had used echoed of regret. Shan looked back at the workbench. “He told you to scan that journal? He used those words?”

Sansan slowly broke her gaze from the altar. “Yes. It surprised me. I didn’t expect him to understand about computers. But that night he showed me differently.”

“What else happened?”

“He asked where I could get access to the Internet in town, if there was any place other than my house. I explained that sometimes I connected in the café, that sometimes the owner, another old professor, left the circuits on without controls when he left at night, and that he always kept the shop unlocked.” She cast a pointed glance at Shan. Beijing required those who provided public access to the Internet to record the identity of every user.

“Sansan, surely you don’t mean Jamyang wanted to use your computer.”