Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

* * *

In the early morning Shan was sitting by a tree as Corbett emerged, bag in hand, dressed for travel.

Corbett saw the bag by Shan’s side, and gestured to a car. “Where can I take you?”

“Town.”

“Last night I thought about things. That little cottage on the island,” Corbett said. “I’m going to open it up, live there for a while. Paint.”

“You don’t have to go back so soon.”

“This isn’t over until I give the check to the girl’s parents. And I told Bailey to hold the emperor’s fresco. I want to see it before it goes back.”

Minutes later, as Shan climbed out, he saw the package Liya had given Corbett sitting on the American’s bag. “What was it?”

“Haven’t worked up the nerve yet.” Corbett reached for Liya’s gift. It was wrapped in several layers of heavy felt, and when the last fell away Corbett’s breath rushed out. “Lama’s pajamas,” he whispered.

It was the framed limerick, the one the major had left in his cottage on the wall, written on army letterhead. There was a note on the back. A grin grew on the American’s face as he read it, then he handed it to Shan. The tale of the tall American dancing with the old blind woman in the moonlight will live in our hearts all our lives, it said. Already the children have seen a rainbow extending in the direction of America and asked if you were at the other end. When you find the right rainbow, there will be a house for you in Bumpari.

“Will you return?” Shan handed it back and shut the car door.

Corbett put the car into gear. “All it takes is the right rainbow.” He reached through the open window and grabbed Shan’s hand a moment, then sped away.

Most of the night soil collectors had already left on their morning rounds, but in the old stable two women were refilling butter lamps in front of the secret painting.

“Do you expect him back soon?” Shan asked.

The nearest woman straightened and slowly shook her head. “Never. He is gone from us.”

“Gone?”

“Yesterday, after the Mountain Buddha appeared,” she said. “He began gathering his brushes and paints. He said he had to go, he had to go find another town where he was needed. I gave him a sack with some food and he just walked away, singing an old pilgrim’s song.”

Without thinking about it Shan helped the women fill the remaining lamps, then studied Surya’s painting again in silence. It was how some of the saints had lived, the old man had said on his prior visit, traveling from town to town, illuminating deities. When Shan finally emerged from the compound, holding his retreat bag, a familiar car was waiting.

Tan, at the wheel, stretched across the seat and opened the door for him. Shan climbed in, clutching his bag to his chest. “Public Security came early this morning,” the colonel said in a tight voice. “They’re gone now. Ming, too. There will be one of those secret trials they provide for senior Party members.”

Shan assumed Tan needed help with the statement he would be expected to make at Ming’s trial. Yet they did not turn at the gate for the army base but continued onto a gravel road Shan knew all too well. He pressed the bag tighter to his chest and looked at the distant mountains.

“There were powder marks on Dolan’s hand,” Tan said as the prison compound came into view. “He had shot a gun just before he died.”

“Looters,” Shan said. “You read Yao’s letter. He struggled with the looters, got a gun away from them.”

“We both know it was a lie. Would it be so bad if one of the wealthiest capitalists in the world were shown to be a murderer and thief, a common criminal?”

Shan studied Tan’s face a moment, weighing his words. He had learned in Tibet not only that justice was an elusive thing, but that it was one of the essential things, one of the true things, Lokesh would say, for which words were never sufficient. It was constructed partly of truth, partly of the spiritual. And for someone like Tan it was always at least partly political. “If it were so, an army of investigators would descend on Lhadrung from Beijing and America, then journalists and diplomats and television news teams from all over the world, hordes of them, nothing like the handful that came yesterday. Lhadrung would be under a microscope. Perhaps it would be a great opportunity for you,” Shan ventured.

Tan sighed and stopped the car short of the gate, near where the supply tent had been pitched. He stared at the mountains a long time, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth. “Opportunity,” he said slowly, “interests me no more.” He shrugged. “I’ll have to alert the adjoining counties since the looters have obviously abandoned Lhadrung.”

He stepped out of the car. Shan followed. The field where the extra troops had camped was empty. As Tan lit another cigarette, Shan turned toward the wire, fifty feet away. It was the prisoners’ rest day, and a few of the old men could be seen at the far side of the prison grounds sitting in a circle.

“I am going back into the mountains,” he said with an uneasy feeling. Tan, pacing along the side of the car, appeared not to hear. A sentry stationed outside the gate seemed to recognize Shan and muttered something to the guard inside the entrance, who began watching Shan warily.

Finally the colonel returned to the driver’s door, and seemed about to climb back in when three men emerged from the administration building, two guards and a gaunt youth, manacled, his freshly shaven head down, wearing newly issued prison greys. Shan watched in silence as the guards pulled the new prisoner toward the inner wire.

“I can’t change what he did, the sentence he received,” Tan said. “But I told them the 404th is harsher than any coal mine, that I deserved to keep him for all the trouble he caused me.”

The prisoner was pushed toward the wire, spreading his arms to grip the fence, staring at the thin, bent figures inside. He did not move as the guards unlocked his manacles and opened the gate, did not react as they pulled him from the fence and led him through the razor-wire-lined passageway into the prison. But then he slowly raised his head as if sensing onlookers, and turned toward Shan. It was Ko.

As his gaze locked with that of his father, he froze, then was shoved forward by the guards. When he passed the razor wire, into the dead zone, he stopped and stared again at Shan, who took several steps forward, toward the wire, into the dead zone on the outside of the wire. He heard the protests of the guards, a sharp reprimand from Tan that quieted them.

Ko’s mouth curled up into his defiant grin. He raised his injured hand, wrapped in a now-bloody bandage, and lifted it over his head toward Shan. Shan silently raised his own hand, and for a moment they stared at each other, both grinning, until a guard’s baton found Ko’s shoulder. His son dropped to his knees as the second guard’s boot pushed him forward. They lifted him by the waist of his pants, carried him out of the dead zone, dropped him facefirst into the dirt, then left.

A terrible silence descended over the camp, punctuated by the sound of the gate closing, its bolt loudly clicking into place. Then a thin old Tibetan clad in prison rags hobbled from behind one of the barracks and knelt at Ko’s side. In the still air Shan heard a sound, not distinct words but a tone of comfort, as the aged lama reached out and rested a hand on his son’s back.