Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Shan’s heart lurched as he saw the prisoners. Most were emaciated veterans of years in the gulag, wearing the dull, battered expressions of those without hope. Scattered among them was fresh meat from the east, new prisoners whose faces were tight with fear, not of the guards but of their fellow prisoners, the gaunt reflections of the creatures they would become.

Shan had wondered why so many truckloads were on the move that day, but now he saw the smaller truck behind the first, its open cargo bay piled high with shovels and picks, and stacks of the baskets used for hauling dirt and stones. There were special hard-labor mines for such prisoners, opened only in the summer, some in deep treacherous tunnels prone to cave-ins. Others would go to uranium pits where the radiation would cause every prisoner’s hair to fall out by the end of the first month. They were considered the lucky ones, for they would work in the open air and the guards tended to keep their distance for fear of contaminating themselves.

“Buddha’s breath,” Jigten gasped. “Look at the bastards. Half of them are walking skeletons.” He pulled out a cigarette and tossed it to one of the rail-thin prisoners. Another prisoner jerked forward, grabbing it out of the air. With a victorious expression he stuffed it into his mouth and ate it.

* * *

The grounds of the former monastery used by the Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute had been lavishly restored. Through the open gate at its entrance, statues of Mao and Buddha stood at either side of the courtyard, staring at each other, an elegant, newly built chorten in between. Shan and Meng, dressed in hastily acquired civilian clothes, watched from an outside table at a café across the street. Monks entered the Institute carrying books. Chinese men and women in business suits moved in and out of the gate. Tibetan townspeople passed through the gate to stand before the Buddha, sometimes draping a traditional prayer scarf over its wrist. At times the compound seemed to convey the air of a traditional monastery, at others it seemed more like a busy government office complex.

They sat in silence, finishing their tea and then accepting a new pot from the waiter. Shan found his gaze drifting toward the street traffic and the flow of urban life. A woman hurried a young girl in pigtails across the street. Two boys teased a puppy with a feather tied to a string. A Tibetan woman hawked hot noodles and momos, meat dumplings, from plastic pails covered with towels. A tall Tibetan led a donkey down the street, the black sash woven in his hair marking him as a Khampa.

“You said you had a son,” Meng suddenly said. “So you are married?”

It was part of her cover, he told himself at first. They were supposed to be a man and a woman having tea together. Then he saw the shy way she looked at him.

“No,” he replied. “Not now. Not ever I guess.”

“You guess?”

“My wife had the marriage annulled.”

“But you have a son.”

“We never spent more than two weeks together. She was in the Party, got an assignment in another city. By the time I was sent to prison she was a vice mayor. After my son was arrested as a drug dealer it was better for her to deny her connections with us.”

“So she got a divorce, you mean.”

“No. Too messy. My son and I would still be on her record. More politically expedient to get a judge in the Party to issue a decree for the records to be erased. It was as if we never existed in her life.”

“That must have been painful.”

Shan shrugged. “I was busy building roads and trying to stay alive on corncobs and sawdust gruel. It was years before I even knew.”

They sipped tea in silence, forgetting the gate for a long moment.

“Surely you…” Shan was not sure how to finish his query.

“Surely I was married? Yes,” Meng said matter-of-factly. “He studied literature and drama. He wrote very well but couldn’t find a job so he took one in a faceless building where they wrote public scripts for the government. Eulogies for Eighth Route Army veterans. Tales of worker heroes, real and otherwise. He was good at it, good at finding words to tug at the heartstrings of the proletariat. He got noticed. They promoted him. He began writing speeches for officials and news releases for the Party.”

“Propaganda.” The word slipped out before Shan could stop it.

Meng gave an awkward nod. “I didn’t like it. He didn’t like it, not at first. He drank. They kept promoting him and he kept drinking. That was the first time I was a lieutenant. When they assigned him to Beijing, they made me a captain, arranging security for officials. I begged him to quit. I said he had sold his soul, that he was better than that. He hit me.”

Shan lifted his cup and stared at her over its lip, wondering what it might have been like if he had met Meng like this, not wearing a knob uniform.

“I asked to leave the job, leave Beijing. They broke me and sent me to a stable in Tibet.”

“A stable?”

“Public Security jargon. Where officers who have fallen out of favor are sent to be mere workhorses, to plod along without hope of advancement. The jobs no one else wants, in some god-forsaken backwater. Baiyun’s a stable, though they told me to consider it rehabilitation, that my record once had been so good I might still might find advancement in four or five years. A few months after I arrived I got the papers saying he had divorced me.”

Shan forced himself to look at the gate again, to avoid her eyes. “You didn’t have to tell me that,” he said. When he looked back she was staring at a pigeon. She looked like a young, lost girl. He looked at her hand on the table and realized he wanted to touch it.

Her face hardened as she felt his stare. “It’s an interrogation technique,” she said, wincing as if she had bitten something sour. “Let the subject know we are all comrades in the same difficult struggle.”

They fell silent again for several minutes, watching the gate again.

“People go in and don’t come out,” Shan observed.

“There’s a chapel. People go in and meditate. They may take an hour or two.”

“It’s an Institute,” Shan replied. “Those carrying briefcases are not going in to meditate.”

“There’s an official public description,” Meng observed, waving a brochure she had picked up in the guesthouse they had registered at, two blocks away. “And there are official private descriptions.”

“I don’t follow.”

The lieutenant unfolded the brochure and began reading. “The Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute is building bridges between the Han and Tibetan ethnic groups that reside in this region of the People’s Republic. By teaching the oneness of our great peoples we build happiness and socialist prosperity in every home.”

“Socialist prosperity,” Shan echoed. “It wasn’t written by a Tibetan. And the first Han seen here wore the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. This is Chamdo, traditional capital of Kham province, where Tibetan warriors using muskets were mown down by Chinese machine guns.” He frowned, not understanding why he felt the need to goad her.

Meng ignored him. “There are places on the Internet reserved for the government. They require special passwords.” She touched her cell phone and the screen came to life.

Shan cast a nervous glance around the cafe´ and leaned forward. “You know passwords for the Institute?”

“Public Security has a new database, like a reference guide to organizations that officers may need to know about.” She lowered her voice and read from the little screen. “The Peace Institute in Chamdo is a unique facility,” Meng recited, “where Buddhist teachers acquire the perspectives needed to lead their cadres into the future. Those who graduate from the Institute are awarded provisional membership in the Party. Some go on to serve the Motherland in strategic and often heroic capacities.”