Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

When he looked up his son was grinning. “They seem to think I am the wildest tiger in their cage.”

Shan opened his mouth to speak and found he couldn’t. He swallowed and tried again. “What happened?”

“When I didn’t get your letter I was worried. But then they pulled me out of the barracks one night and dragged me to the lockup. Then I knew everything was all right.”

“But why, Ko? What was it?”

“Nothing. That’s what I mean,” Ko said, still grinning. “I didn’t do a thing this time. That’s when I realized you must be okay, that you had just done something that really pissed them off.”

Ko had been a handsome youth but his years in prison had aged him prematurely. He was hard and thin and scarred. Two fingers, once broken, had never healed properly and were permanently crooked. His grin revealed teeth chipped from beatings. He smelled of urine.

“Do they feed you?” Shan asked.

“Sure. Piles of beef and chicken. So much I had to go on a diet.”

Shan offered a hollow smile. He fought the compulsion to leap up and embrace his son for fear of bringing the guards from the back of the chamber. “I had a dream the other night,” he said to his son. “A memory really, but so vivid. I was visiting you when you were five or six. I took you to the cricket market in Beijing. There were hundreds of crickets, fighting crickets, singing crickets, crickets bred just to be beautiful, each in its own cage. I couldn’t drag you away. We stayed for hours, talking to the old men who sold them. Even the cages were amazing, intricate little things of bamboo and rosewood and molded gourds with carved ivory caps. One of them let you take his cricket for a walk on a leash of braided silk thread. You couldn’t stop laughing. I told you about my grandfather, who had a green cricket with a funny name that always sang at midnight. You kept laughing at the name, kept repeating it all the way home.”

Ko was staring at him now with an empty expression, as if he did not hear. Sometimes he would stay like that for Shan’s entire visit. For several months he had been confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, where experimental drugs had been used.

Shan kept speaking, about the weather, about Lokesh, about how he had made some friends in the new Pioneer town. He always kept talking when Ko blanked out, though he didn’t know if he did so for Ko, for himself, or for the guards.

“There’s an owl who comes,” Ko suddenly said.

Shan cocked his head.

“I have one of those tiny windows near the top of my cell. He comes in the middle of the night. He spits out fur and bones from his prey and I eat them.” Ko’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He dropped a feather the other night. I have to keep it hidden because they would confiscate it. But when the guards aren’t near I take it out and study it. It’s a miracle, you know, a feather.”

“I know what Lokesh will say. A deity has sought you out in owl form.”

Ko grinned again. “Five years ago I would have laughed at that. Now I am not so sure.”

“Then there is hope for you yet, Son.”

They both smiled. Despite where they were, despite the tortured paths their lives had taken, when they were together they smiled a lot. But Ko had seen something in his father’s eyes. “You have to push it down,” his son declared.

“I’m sorry?”

“You taught me that. The greatest power of a prisoner lies in pushing down his fear.”

The words made Shan’s throat constrict. He offered a small, slow nod.

Ko kept smiling as his face drifted back into the vacant, unfocused expression.

Shan became aware that the guards were at his side, releasing Ko from his chair. “Be well, Son,” he said quietly. “Lha gyal lo.”

When he turned he saw Meng waiting, staring at the two of them from the back of the room. She too was silent as his son was escorted past her into the corridor. Halfway down the hall Ko’s voice rang out. “Thunder Dragon!” he shouted. “Grandfather’s cricket was called Thunder Dragon!” He staggered as a guard pounded his shoulder, then slowly straightened and marched on.

Shan kept watching until the heavy metal door slammed behind his son.

* * *

It was Meng who broke the long silence on the drive back to the valley. “He’s going to survive,” she said in a tight voice. “I can see it in his eyes. They burn like yours.”

He pointed to a family of partridges crossing the road. He had no stomach for talk of prisons and prisoners. The visit with Ko had been more painful than most. He knew he would relive it, every second of it, the next time he tried to sleep.

Meng dropped him off where she had found him that morning. No one answered, however, when he knocked on Yuan’s door. He considered walking the miles to Lung’s compound for his truck but knew the repairs would not have been completed. In the square he sat on a bench across from the plinth. The statue that had been on it was gone. Someone had placed a little souvenir Buddha there instead, looking ridiculously small on the big stone base. It stood on its own plinth, a red book of Mao’s quotations.

He could not remember when he had felt so powerless. The valley, which for so long had been a stronghold of Tibetan tradition, was falling, soon to become another landscape of internment camps and immigrant settlements. Jamyang and the abbess, Lung Ma and the German, had died for nothing. No, a despairing voice said, they had died because of Beijing, had died to fuel the machine that was grinding up Tibet.

It was no longer the truth that was eluding him, it was what to do with the truth. Extracting the truth usually felt like pulling some shiny bauble out of a quagmire. But this time the truth had claimed him, pulling him down into the murk. He was suffocating in it. There was no path open to him. No Tibetan would believe him now if he tried to confront the killer. Shan would just be another bitter bonecatcher, resentful of a Tibetan hero. He rose and walked the streets, walked around every block of the small town. Those he passed turned away from him.

Finally he found himself at the side door of the police post, and sat on the step. The world was closing in around him. Liang and those he served had won. Shan and Jamyang had lost. The only real mystery had been why he had ever thought he could change things. He stared at the night sky a long time, until suddenly he heard his son’s words again. Push down your fear. It is the greatest power a prisoner can have.

He stepped inside and found Meng staring at two papers on her desk. She raised one. “I am ordered to initiate a process against Professor Yuan and his daughter to revoke their Pioneer status.”

“Meaning what?”

“They will be given a chance to provide evidence of their loyalty. Meaning they will have ten days to inform on unpatriotic activity known to them. Or they will be revoked and sent back to face their original charges. Certain prison for the girl.”

She shook the paper and laid it on the desk. “That one came to me over the Public Security computer.” She raised the other paper. “This one I found on the old fax machine in the outer office they use for messages to the constables. An arrest order for Abbot Norbu. Not to me,” she said pointedly, “to the local Tibetan constables. They are supposed to join Armed Police at Chegar tomorrow night to make the arrest, at the monks’ evening assembly.”

“The charges?”

“Political activity by a registered monk. Organizing unauthorized public assemblies. Suspicion of conspiracy against the government.”

“The constables,” he observed. “Do you ever wonder why those who blow their horns are never caught?”

“Only why we would trouble over them.”