Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Surya couldn’t kill,” Liya said in a voice like a whimper. “I spoke with him, two nights ago. He gave me prayers to keep me safe when riding my horse at night. He could have gone into the tunnels and hit his head. He could have imagined … but the blood, all the blood. It can’t be, he is our monk.”

Her strange soliloquy had broken Gendun out of his contemplation. He was looking at Liya with an expression Shan had never before seen on the lama’s face. A sad, tormented confusion. Before Shan could react, Gendun stepped away to stand on a ledge that overlooked Zhoka.

He looked back at Liya. None of them could explain the blood. And Dawa had seen a man with a nail through his body, an hour after Surya’s strange words. Here you must be nailed to the earth, the monk had proclaimed.

“Two nights ago Surya did not come to the chorten,” Shan said. “Where did you see him?” Liya turned away, toward Gendun. “Who else was in the hills?” Shan pressed. “You saw foreigners last night. Who did you see the night before?” Shan stepped close to her back. “Jara said there are people who will kill for a word. He would not speak it. What word?”

Liya spun about to face him, her jaw clenched, as if afraid to speak, and backed away.

As Gendun settled onto the ledge Shan approached him, sitting three feet away. He watched the clouds scud westward. He found himself looking not at Zhoka but beyond it, toward Yerpa. There was a small cell in the old hermitage where he had been made comfortable, given cushions and blankets from the ancient storerooms, where he had spent the most peaceful months of his entire life. He wondered if he would ever see it again.

They sat in silence for a quarter hour as Liya and Lokesh gathered some of the belongings the hill people had left scattered across the slope. Gendun did not move, did not offer a mantra, did not touch his mala, his prayer beads, only folded his hands together, palms down, middle fingers raised against each other. It was the diamond of the mind mudra, for focus, for trying to find the center of things. A small blue butterfly landed on the rock between them. Shan watched as Gendun’s eyelids fluttered. His eyes found the butterfly, then Shan.

“You are going to ask what he gave me,” the lama said in a near whisper, then handed Shan a crumbled strip of cloth, torn from the grey muslin of an underrobe. “He told me to repeat it ten thousand times, to keep him from coming back.”

Shan read the words scrawled on the cloth. Om Amrta Hum Phat. It was a mantra for expelling what the Tibetans called hindering demons.

“Keep who from coming back?” he asked.

“Himself,” Gendun sighed. “Surya.” The lama searched Shan’s face, his eyes filled with a mournful confusion. “I can find no balance in what happened today,” he said. “Something crushed Surya’s deity.”

Shan remembered the little statue Atso had with him. The butterfly walked to the edge of the rock and appeared to be staring at the ruins below.

Gendun seemed to follow the gaze of the butterfly. “It is one of the oldest temples in all of Tibet. Before it was built demons roamed freely across the earth. People forget that. People forget the important things.”

“I thought it was known for its artists.”

“What is the work of artists? To invoke deities. It takes a deity to fight a demon. It is how our artists are made.”

Shan gazed at the ruins. It was the way of most of his conversations with the lama, who used short sentences to punctuate long silences, which with Gendun were always more important than words. “You mean if Surya killed something it was a demon.”

Gendun looked back at the butterfly, and when at last he spoke it was toward the fragile little creature. “The demon was in the killing,” he said. “A killing is the same act, on the killer and the killed. It just affects them in different ways.”

“Did you always know about Zhoka, Rinpoche?” Shan asked.

“No,” Gendun admitted, offering a small nod to Shan, as if conceding a point. For decades the monks of Yerpa had been wary of venturing more than a mile from their hermitage. “Once there were many gompas in Lhadrung, now many ruins. We did not know how different Zhoka was from the other ruins. It had been kept secret from the rest of the world, for good reason. But Surya found an old book in a cave high in the mountains, wrapped in fur as if it were hibernating. He was so excited. It explained the things that had happened here.” He bent low to the butterfly. “Zhoka made the earth quake,” he whispered to the fragile creature.

Shan resisted the urge to stare at the old lama, to study his face. Gendun had little trust in words, thought they as often detracted from the truth as led to it. He would never try to reduce to words the complete essence of a thought, a person, a place, because words were incapable of expressing the ultimate truth. But he had begun to express something Shan had not understood before, that the hermits had not come to Zhoka simply because it was a convenient place to reach the hill people, or even because it was a ruined gompa.

Gendun extended his finger in front of the rock and the butterfly climbed onto it. “The child Dawa threw your bag over the edge,” the lama said with a sigh. “I am sorry about your throwing sticks. Your father’s sticks.”

“I strive not to be attached to physical possessions,” Shan said in a tight voice.

Gendun offered a sad smile. “They weren’t physical to you. They were the spark of your father, and grandfather, and fathers before them. They raised the spirits of your ancestors within you.”

For a moment something tightened around Shan’s heart. More than once Shan had explained to Gendun and Lokesh how sometimes, using the old lacquered yarrow sticks, he could sense the presence of his father, even smell the ginger he had often carried in his pocket. “Just some old sticks,” Shan said in a weak voice.

Gendun whispered to the butterfly and it flew away toward Zhoka, as if on an errand. They watched until it disappeared in the distance, then Shan stood and offered a hand to Gendun. “A sky machine,” the lama said as he rose. “One of those sky machines seized him.” His hand rose and his fingers extended then slowly closed as if reaching for something invisible to the rest of them. “Last spring, in the north, I spoke to a shepherd woman who had lost her husband that way. She went out every day and sat on a hill with her beads, searching the sky because she said he could return out of a cloud at any time.” Shan stared at the lama, for a moment paralyzed by what he saw. A tear rolled down Gendun’s cheek. “Surya.” He said the name like a prayer.

Shan heard a tiny gasp and turned to see Lokesh was sitting behind them. He had never seen his old friend so pale. The old Tibetan had seen the tear too, and was watching it with a strange despairing awe as it reached Gendun’s jaw and hung there.

“For over forty years Surya and I prayed together,” Gendun said. “When we were novices our task was to rise together two hours before dawn and light lamps throughout the hermitage, and all these years we never stopped doing it, never asked the new novices to take over. Now I am to pray to keep him away from us. Before him I had never known someone who could take a piece of cloth and pigment and…” Gendun looked back toward the tower, with its vibrant paintings and closed his eyes for a moment. “In one writing Surya found, a lama of three hundred years ago said that the artists of Zhoka spread spirit fire.”

“They could come back,” a worried voice interjected from behind them. Liya was standing at their backs, scanning the hills with her binoculars again. “The soldiers know of this place now.”