Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

He had sat under the stars before leaving the camp, unable to understand, but unable to control the wild emotions Tashi’s message had triggered. After several minutes Lokesh had sat beside him.

“It is some kind of trap,” Shan had murmured. “They can’t know where my son is. I have to stay. I have to find a way for Surya to come back to us, make sure they take no more monks.”

“When I was young,” his old friend said, “I heard my mother say to her sister that once you have a child it isn’t just your own deity that resides inside you, that there is something new, that your child becomes like an altar. I never understood then. I thought it was strange, that she meant something about worshiping children. I forgot about it until the year I spent in prison with my mother.” Lokesh referred not to being with his mother, who had died before the Chinese invasion, but to the year he had dedicated to meditation on his mother, in honor of her, when he had tried to recall every event of their life together, sometimes offering stories to the other inmates, sometimes staying silent for entire days, immersed in memory.

“If I go back to them, to that inspector I met, to the colonel, they will try to force me to help them with whatever they are doing in the mountains. They will demand I help them find another monk from the mountains.”

Lokesh gave no sign of hearing him. “I realized one night what she meant,” he continued. “She meant that a parent honors his or her deity through their children, that your child is part of the way you worship.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Don’t stay in the mountains because of Gendun or Surya. They will follow the path of their own deities. Go to the valley because your son needs what only you can provide. Hold that in your heart, and no matter what happens, you will have done the right thing.”

The memory of those words calmed Shan now. If nothing else the news from the informer had cracked open a door in his mind that had been too long sealed, the entrance to a chamber that held images of a timid little boy walking with Shan in city parks, of a baby cradled in his arms, a baby who, impossibly, was his offspring, even scenes of his son sitting with lamas and other images that existed only in his fantasies. At times in prison such images had helped him stay alive. But when, a year before, Tan had brutally reported that his wife had divorced him and remarried, doubtlessly telling their son Shan was dead, Shan had slammed the door shut, vowing to himself never to enter the place again, for only pain resided there. That pain had flooded out now, but so, too, had a desperate, ridiculous hope.

He stared into the sky until he saw a falling star, then set out once again.

For the second time in two days, Shan entered the town through the market square. He waited at a public water pipe as a woman filled two buckets, then, exhausted from his nighttime trek through the mountains, he opened the faucet and held his face under the stream of cold water. He kept kneeling after he shut the faucet, watching the water drip into a small cement basin at its base, trying again to calm himself. He should turn and run back into the mountains, a voice shouted inside his head. No one in Lhadrung could possibly have information about his son. It was just the kind of cruel trick Tan might use to lure him.

But as he rose and took an uncertain step toward the shadows of the next building a hand clamped around his upper arm. A radio crackled, and someone began speaking excitedly. Shan turned and looked into the eyes of a young soldier with a pockmarked face, a face he had seen previously in Colonel Tan’s personal security squad. Another soldier stood at the open door of a small army truck, leaning his head into a handheld radio.

Moments later they were speeding across the valley floor, Shan sitting between the two soldiers in the cab of the truck. They drove in silence for less than ten minutes, entering a thin forest on the western slope, climbing a winding road Shan recognized. He had traveled up the same road over a year earlier, to a small walled compound, a partially destroyed gompa that had been under reconstruction as a private club for officials. Reconstruction seemed to have stopped, Shan saw as they climbed out of the truck. The stucco walls were heavily cracked, weeds still grew in the beds at their base. Only the bilingual sign at the entrance was new, announcing the Lhadrung Guest House.

As they stepped through the gate the soldier in front of him kicked up gravel. It was red. It was the gravel he had seen in the tires of the car driven by McDowell. Inside, canvas hung down from the top of the rear wall of the center courtyard, covering a row of bulky objects, no doubt the same architectural artifacts, dismantled or broken, he had seen arrayed along the wall the year before. A small fountain in the center of the yard wheezed and sputtered, ejecting a feeble spurt of water every few seconds.

His escort pushed him into the entry of the largest building and surrendered Shan to another soldier wearing a tunic with breast pockets, the sign of an officer, who led him toward a door painted with bright red enamel.

The large chamber they entered had been plastered and painted since Shan’s last visit, converted to a combination meeting room and lounge. At one end a long sofa sat in deep shadow, flanked by two overstuffed chairs adorned with lace doilies on their backs and arms. Beyond the sofa, in the far corner, were wooden chairs in deeper shadow. To the left of the entrance stood a long wide wooden table with a dozen wooden chairs. On the wall behind the table hung a map of the county and another of the People’s Republic of China. The only light in the room came from a fixture suspended over the table, illuminating three sour faces, all staring at Shan.

Colonel Tan sat at the head of the table, holding a cigarette close to his lips, letting the smoke waft around his head. Inspector Yao, wearing a peeved but satisfied expression, like a teacher about to dole out punishment to his least liked student, held a steaming porcelain cup in his hands. Opposite Yao, Director Ming sat with a stack of files in front of him, hands pressed to the table, an expectant look on this face.

The silence seemed as heavy as Tan’s cigarette smoke, broken only by a muttered curse from the colonel.

“Some pants. Get him some damned pants,” a slow, deep voice said from the shadows, in English.

Shan looked down at his legs. His trousers, already tattered and threadbare, had jagged tears below the knee from his falls the night before. A flap of cloth hung from his left leg, exposing part of a scraped and bleeding shin. Dried blood darkened the fabric in several places.

Tan glared at Yao, as if expecting a translation. But before Yao could speak, Ming stood with a melodramatic air. “There seems to be some mistake,” he said, stepping toward Shan. Shan gazed at the floor, at the elegant Tibetan carpet that ran the length of the table. Prisoner reflexes came easy after four years in the gulag. He did not move, did not react as Ming lifted his arm and pushed up his sleeve, then pointed to the tattoo on Shan’s forearm. “This man is a convict. A criminal.”

Shan sensed movement in the shadow, someone rising from a chair. “This man saved my life,” the same deep voice boomed, now in Chinese. “If you do not give him some clean pants I am going to take mine off and give them to him.” The words rang like an alarm.

Yao stood up, muttering to Tan, who rose a second later and barked an order. The officer who had escorted Shan reappeared, running to Tan, then out a rear door, returning less than a minute later with a pair of grey pants which he tossed to Yao, who laid them on the sofa in the shadows. When no one spoke Shan stepped to the sofa and changed pants. Near the sofa a large pad of paper was fastened to an easel, its top page bearing a name in large ideograms. Kwan Li. Below it was a description that read like a resume: Age forty-four; Prince; General; Served in Lhasa, Beijing, Xian. Turning, he stepped out of the shadows and found the American he had seen the day before seated at the table.