Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

* * *

The sun had been down for at an hour when Shan returned to the guesthouse. He had declined the evening meal, leaving Meng alone while he searched the shrines of the town for Dakpo. He climbed the wooden stairs slowly, weary not so much from physical exertion as despair. The monk could have gone on a pilgrimage, Meng had suggested. But not on a moment’s notice, Shan had explained, not in a rush to return by the full moon. Dakpo would not have had travel papers. More likely, he had been picked up, and was just a number in some distant detention center by now. The full moon. It was only a few days away now. Shan paused, then pulled out the note on which he had recorded the dates given to Lung Ma by Jamyang. One date, the date for the monk’s test run to Nepal, had already transpired. The last date was the date of the full moon.

He washed, then secured Yuan Yi’s badge in the bottom of his pack. He settled onto his bed but knew he could not sleep, so he rose and lifted the window, taking in the sounds of urban life. The low rumble of trucks rose from the highway half a mile away. Dogs barked. A child squealed with laughter in a nearby alley. Someone dumped bottles in a trash bin. The scent of fried onions and rice wafted in the night air. Shan was suddenly famished.

“I told them to save our dinner.”

Meng stood in the doorway that connected their rooms, holding two tin boxes. She handed Shan the still-warm containers and disappeared back into her room, returned with another chair and a small table that she set below the window. She laid out a towel for a tablecloth and topped it with a candle in a soda bottle. “There’s a brownout. The front desk was passing out candles.”

“You’ve been busy,” Shan said awkwardly as Meng struck a match and lit the candle.

“Not really. I shopped a little and fell asleep on my bed.”

Shan looked away, aware that he had been staring at her. She was not the austere woman he was accustomed to. Her hair hung loose and long over a blouse of red silk. As she opened his box of food and handed him a pair of chopsticks, she offered an uncertain smile. “We’re just two travelers tonight, experiencing a strange city together.”

Shan did not recognize the flicker of emotion he felt, was not sure why he stared after her when she stepped back into her room for a thermos of tea.

“There was no sign of Dakpo,” he said between mouthfuls of dumplings and fried vegetables.

Meng poured him a cup of tea. “I saw a park this evening where a boy was flying a kite with an old man,” she said in a quiet voice. “When I was young my uncle used to take me to a park like that every spring. We would leave very early, have to take several buses. I remember getting onto that last bus that took us to the park and how most of the passengers would be children with kites. The kite brigade my uncle called it. I thought it meant we were all going to be soldiers. But I didn’t want to be a soldier. Once, I saw a soldier with a kite in the park and I ran and hid because I thought he had come for me.”

Shan realized he had stopped eating.

“What is it?” Meng asked.

“I don’t…” Shan struggled for words. He stared at his food. “I don’t know how to do this. I’m sorry.”

“This? You don’t know how to eat your supper?”

“I mean you and me like this.”

“I seem to recall we have sat in more than one teahouse together.”

“Not like this. Not talking like a man and a woman.”

Meng’s face tightened. “You want me to leave?” she asked in a near whisper.

“No,” Shan said, too quickly. “I’m sorry. I’ve done too many things. I’ve seen too many things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In the gulag you learn to let scars grow over certain places in your heart.”

Meng was quiet for a long time. It was her turn to stare at her food. She bit her lip. “Then we will just practice for a while,” she said at last.

The melancholy in her eyes almost took Shan’s breath away.

They ate in silence.

“I had two camels when I was a boy,” he heard himself say in an oddly parched voice. He drank some tea and tried again. “Little wooden camels. They were my treasures. My uncle had been a trader in Beijing and gave them to me one New Year’s. We would light candles and he would speak long into the night about the way Beijing was when he lived there. In the winter there would be long caravans of camels, two humped camels, winding down the streets carrying huge baskets of coal. Sometimes he would go out and the alley he lived on would be entirely blocked by camels waiting to be unloaded. The handlers were all Mongolians, and in those moments he said it was like the great khans who built the city had never left. He expected to see Marco Polo at the next corner. I loved those stories, and I kept those camels even when we were sent to the communes for reeducation. My mother told me to pack my extra shoes but I packed my camels instead.”

The words began flowing freely then, and they spoke of tales of their childhood, of schooldays, of youthful visits to the sacred mountains of the east, of anywhere but where they were. It was nearly midnight when Meng packed up the empty dishes and returned them to her room. Shan went down the hall to the washroom, then stripped and lay under his sheet, watching the moon through the window.

She entered so quietly he was not aware of her until she stepped into a pool of moonlight ten feet from his bed. She was wearing only a sleeveless undershirt.

“What is it?” he asked, pulling the sheet up over his bare chest.

In reply she pulled the shirt over her head. “I’m not so old, Shan,” she said as she let the shirt drop on the floor.

“You-you should probably go.” He had trouble getting the words out.

“Do you have any idea, Comrade, how many years go by without my even meeting a man I respect enough?” She took a step closer.

“Surely not me,” Shan whispered. “I’m so much older.”

“You’re not so old.”

“I feel old,” he said. “That’s gone from my life.”

“You told me you couldn’t talk like a man with a woman. Then we talked for hours.”

“That was different.”

She was at the edge of his bed. “Then we will just practice for while,” she said, and lifted his covers.

“This isn’t the way we should…” The words died in his throat. Meng had her own way. His hand trembled as she raised it and placed it on her body.

Afterwards she lay in the round of his shoulder. “What happened to them?” she asked. “To those two wooden camels.”

“My mother got sick that first winter. We burned them to make her some tea.”

The temple at the front of the Institute was already attracting a steady flow of visitors when Shan settled onto the stone flags of its floor the next morning. Tibetans and a few Chinese on the way to work in shops and offices were lighting sticks of incense and lowering themselves in front of altars beside a handful of monks who had been there when Shan arrived. Along a wall half a dozen other monks sat, some twirling handheld prayer wheels. A handful of Tibetans, in the rough clothing of farmers and herders, moved along the shrines that lined the opposite wall.

He glanced toward the door. Meng had been gone when he had awakened, had been all business when he had seen her briefly in the lobby of the guesthouse. She had greeted him with only an awkward smile and he had realized she was feeling the same uncertainty about the night before. He was stunned by the tenderness that had welled up within him, unbidden, unknown for so many years that he had thought he had lost all capacity for it. But as much as he was attracted to who she was, something inside could not help but be repulsed by what she was. He knew too that, for the knob inside her, he was a former convict, a stigma, a chain around her neck, a guarantee that she would never leave her exile within the Bureau. It was no doubt best for both of them to think of the night before as just a fleeting, intimate detour in the crooked paths that were their lives.