Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

The man shrugged again. “Look at him. He no longer wants anything of this world. I’ve seen it before, I saw the way they threw him out the door, the way he cried when they left, because they wouldn’t listen anymore. He said he had to go to the place with the wire, where old lamas are kept until they die.” The beggar stuffed the coins into his pocket and pushed the blanket back over his head.

Shan shifted through his pockets and found a small tsa-tsa, a clay tablet shaped in the image of a saint. He dropped the tsa-tsa into the man’s lap. “You didn’t say what Surya told them.” While the monk had not seemed interested in Shan’s questions, and may have ignored those of interrogators, he still seemed to believe there were things that had to be said.

The beggar pushed the blanket from his head with a frown, then slowly cupped his hands around the clay image. A strange mix of resentment and gratitude filled his eyes when he replied. “They asked about caves, about shrines, about symbols in paintings. They showed him some old thangkas. He kept saying he was a murderer. He kept saying he didn’t know where any more paintings were.”

“He told you this?”

“I heard.”

Shan grimaced, chiding himself for not seeing the obvious. “You’re an informer.”

“Sure. You think I would sit in Tan’s square if they didn’t tell me to?”

“Why would they ask about paintings?”

Again the man shrugged. “Must be a new campaign,” he said, meaning a political initiative. “That was all the old man said, except a warning as they tossed him outside. He said earth taming temples are too dangerous for people like them. As if they would care.” The beggar stuffed the tsa-tsa inside his blanket and covered his head again.

As if they would care. But the old Tibetans would care very much about an earth temple. The beggar’s words echoed in Shan’s mind as he walked through the alleyways. It did not seem possible, but yet it could explain much. Shan had not heard Tibetans speak of the earth taming temples since prison, where they had been woven into the tales told by the oldest lamas on winter nights. Centuries earlier, the construction of Tibet’s monasteries, once numbering in the thousands, had begun with the building of a series of temples in far-reaching concentric rings centered on the country’s most sacred temple, the Jokhang, in Lhasa, over a hundred miles to the northwest. The Jokhang has been built to anchor the heart of the supreme land demon, which had first resisted the introduction of Buddhism. Each of the outlying temples had been constructed on the appendages of the vast demon, some located hundreds of miles from Lhasa. The network kept the land and its people in harmony. Surya had spoken about being nailed to the earth. Shan had not connected the words to the old tales. It was part of the tradition, that the earth temples kept evil demons at bay by pinning them to the earth with sacred nails or daggers.

Though once considered the most important places of spiritual power in Tibet, earth taming temples were a thing of ancient history to most. But they would not be to Gendun, or Surya, or Lokesh. Though some of the locations were still known, most were lost, although he now recalled debate in prison about the old legend that one was located in the region of Lhadrung. Why would Surya suddenly speak of Zhoka as an earth taming temple, Shan wondered. Because, he suddenly recalled, Surya had found an old book in a cave.

* * *

Ten minutes later Shan was walking at the edge of town, watching for a truck that might be heading toward the mountains, when a sudden clamor rose from past the market. He heard applause, and a voice speaking from a public address system. It took him only five minutes to reach the crowd assembled on the athletic field used by the local school. A podium had been erected in front of the small cinder block bleachers, by another bust of Mao on a cement pillar, and a man in a suit was introducing a special guest from Beijing, a renowned scientist, the youngest director ever of his famed institution. A banner ran from the flagpole by the podium to the bleachers, announcing a tribute for Director Ming of the Museum of Antiquities in Beijing, presented by the Chinese Tibetan Friendship Society.

As the assembly of perhaps a hundred people, nearly all Han Chinese, applauded, a man in a blue suit climbed to the podium, his back to Shan. He accepted the microphone from his host. “It is I who applaud you,” he said in a polished voice, once in Mandarin and again in Tibetan. “You are the true heroes of the great reform, you are the ones who have learned how to blend the strengths of all our great cultures.”

Shan stared in disbelief as the man turned and showed his face. It was the tall, well-groomed man from the steps, one of those Tan had tried to avoid. He was the head of the most prestigious museum in Beijing, perhaps in all of China. What was he doing in Lhadrung? Shan listened for several minutes as Director Ming spoke in an earnest voice about the need to meld the great cultures of China, of how the effort was no less a challenge for those in Beijing than for those in Lhadrung. He spoke of how he had decided to locate his summer workshop in Lhadrung due to the fertile ground it represented for that effort, because it was a county where so few Chinese to date had come to live, and which still had much history to share. To emphasize his point he produced a white silk cloth, a khata, a ceremonial Tibetan scarf, raised it with both hands, and with a dramatic air tied it around the neck of the Mao bust. The assembly broke into another round of applause.

Shan retreated, wary of the soldiers who always watched over public assemblies, but as he stepped away from the field he saw the auburn-haired woman sitting in the driver’s seat of the silver car, leaning back, reading a book. He looked to make certain no patrols were near, and approached the open window of the car.

“You gave an apple to a friend of mine,” he said quietly, in English. “Thank you.”

The woman looked up with a thin smile. “I tried to give it to him. I’m not sure he even saw it.” Her voice was sad but her grin remained. “Can you speak with Surya? Maybe he needs to speak with someone he knows better.” A small Tibetan boy appeared, squeezing around Shan, handing the woman a bottle of orange drink.

“Thuchechey,” the woman said, thanking the boy in Tibetan as she handed him a coin worth four times the cost of the drink. The boy grabbed it and darted away with a cry of glee.

“He can’t be reached right now,” Shan said.

“Sounds like you were trying to phone him up,” the woman said. He could not place her accent. She did not sound American.

“I mean-”

“I know what you mean. It’s bloody awful. Please, do you really know him?” She gestured to the seat beside her. “Get in. Please. If you care for him we should speak.”

Shan looked about, half suspecting to see soldiers closing in. The crowd was applauding again, and a woman was on the stage, presenting something to their visiting celebrity.

He studied the woman a moment. She knew Surya. But that was impossible. “Did you meet with him in the mountains?” Shan asked as he slipped in beside her.

“Once. I wasn’t on every visit,” she said. Her voice was soft and refined, well-educated. “My name is McDowell. Elizabeth McDowell. My friends call me Punji, like the sharp bamboo stick.”

Shan did not offer his own name. “What visits? Why go to the ruins?”

“It’s Director Ming’s annual summer seminar. His workshop for graduate students. He’s doing an inventory of ancient sites. Students are helping for the summer, and some of his assistant curators.” On the seat beside McDowell were several papers, including some oversized envelopes, all with the return address of the Tibetan Children’s Relief Fund, at a street in London.