Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“It means you can go home,” Yao said in a hopeful tone as he handed the American some of the buttered tea.

“Home?” Corbett muttered. “Now I can never go home.” He lifted the bowl of salted tea to his lips, sipped, and seemed to gag. He stared doubtfully at the bowl, then looked at the Tibetans, as if he couldn’t believe they were drinking the same brew. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Never have I not recovered the art that was stolen in my cases. I don’t close incomplete files. Not once in my career. If I could have arrested Lodi, I would have found the art eventually. But now…” He shrugged. “Now I have to follow his trail. Where the evidence leads-” he paused and looked doubtfully at the village“-is where I go.”

Yao reacted to the news with a weary expression. He set his bowl of tea on a rock without attempting to taste it, watched as the old blind woman slowly approached their fire. Shan saw him lean forward as if to rise and go to her and placed a restraining hand on Yao’s arm. They watched as the other villagers greeted her and assisted her to a seat, a place of honor on a blanket by the fire, then Shan poured her a bowl and Lokesh handed her a handful of raisins, which she began to consume one at a time, working each one with her gums.

“Grandmother,” Shan said in Tibetan. “I have never before seen the deity on the thangka in the mourning hut.”

She raised a hand in warning. “Its name may not be spoken.” She grinned, as if Shan had attempted mischief and been caught. “I am the only one of the village who may touch the painting, because I was born away from the hills and it has no power over me.”

She had not told him the terrible name but she had told Shan enough. It was the image the godkillers sought. It was why Ming snatched Surya from Zhoka, to understand the shape of this particular four-horned dancing bull god. “William Lodi was still very young,” Shan said. “How did he die?”

“A terrible wound in his side, they said.” She was stroking the back of the goat which lay at her side. “He will be missed by his clan.”

“He was stabbed?” Shan asked.

She did not respond. She had warned him about speaking of the dead. “All these years, no Chinese has ever come to these mountains,” she said after a long silence. “Soldiers were in the distance once but they were frightened of our birds and fled. Now two come, and another goserpa from far away,” she said, using one of the Tibetan words for a Westerner. “Some of us are scared, some confused.” She drank deeply from her bowl. “You have good raisins.”

“Where was his family, his home?”

“Treasure vase, in the south,” she said. “I visited as a child. We sang the queen’s birthday.”

Shan glanced at Lokesh, who listened attentively. His old friend had the same frustration in his eyes Shan felt. She was speaking true words, Lokesh would say, but they did not have the listening.

“Was it people from there who brought Lodi to the birds? Were they with him at Zhoka?”

“There are no monks here, haven’t been these forty years. We have to be monks and nuns in our own way. People trust us like they would a monk.”

Shan cast a wary glance toward Yao and Corbett.

“I wasn’t always blind,” the woman explained suddenly. “I was not always with the ragyapa. I saw more beautiful things while my eyes were alive than most see in a lifetime. Sometimes I think it is why I went blind.”

“You mean at Zhoka?”

“This is a special land, where the hands of deities can work uninterrupted. Those who come from down in the world must be careful in ways they have never been careful before.”

Shan hastily translated, in a whisper, for Yao and Corbett, offering no explanation for her words, for he had none.

The woman’s blind eyes were strangely expressive, filled not with fear but with a sad wonder. Lokesh filled her bowl again, sitting close, reciting the mani mantra with her. The old Tibetan had a special reverence for the blind. More than once he had told Shan how those without eyes were not distracted by all the meaningless activity of the world around them, that those with reverence could learn to use unknown senses to see the movements of deities.

“I am sorry you lost your home,” Lokesh said quietly, after several minutes.

The woman’s hand reached out and without hesitating found Lokesh’s own hand and closed around it. Lokesh had been there the day before, he had said mantras with the village. Shan watched as the two sat in silence, remembering the woman’s words. I was not always with the ragyapa. She was not one of the fleshcutters but, incredibly, she had chosen to live with them.

“It was a long time ago,” she said to Lokesh. “I had brought my father’s body here, and had promised his spirit I would stay to perform one hundred thousand mantras to the Compassionate Buddha. While I was here there were many explosions and guns firing in the north and west, from the valley. Two days later a shepherd came with five yaks, carrying more bodies. My mother. My husband and three children. The army had passed through,” she added, as if reporting a violent storm that had randomly struck her home.

“Grandmother,” Shan said. “Where did you learn your English words?” He switched to English. “I met another woman in the hills who knows some.”

“Give you joy,” she said again, in the Western tongue.

“Her name is Fiona,” he said, still in English.

She gave no sign she understood anything he said except the name of the sturdy, enigmatic woman Shan had met. A smile grew on the blind woman’s face. “Fiona,” she whispered, with sudden excitement. “Give you joy,” she repeated, and when Corbett echoed the words over her shoulder she dabbed at her eyes, suddenly moist, then slowly rose from the ground and, incredibly, began to dance. Hers was a slow, stiff gait, and it took only a glance at Lokesh’s confused expression for Shan to know the dance was not one of those from Tibetan tradition. As fragments of a tune came from her throat, however, Corbett seemed to recognize it, coming forward hesitantly, an uncertain grin on his face as he warily touched his fingers to the blind woman’s hand. Her breath caught, but then as Corbett began humming the tune loudly, she gripped his hand tightly and they danced together.

The entire village stopped, the ragyapa gathering close in the fading light, parents calling children, Lokesh, then others, softly clapping their hands in rhythm, Dawa quietly laughing, the goat standing, softly bleating, an old man in the shadows beating time with a wooden spoon on a clay jar as he hummed the same tune. Time itself seemed to stop. Shan, surprised by joy, watched with the others as the American and the old Tibetan woman danced by the fire, below the rising moon. The gait grew faster but the woman seemed to have no difficulty following. Indeed, the years seemed to drop from her face and in the dimming light Shan glimpsed a much younger woman laughing, eyes gleaming, overflowing with life.

“We have to go,” Yao interjected uneasily, pulling Shan’s arm. “We have to call a helicopter. We have to…” Then Yao, too, was captured by the magic of the moment, seeming to forget his thought as he watched the two dancers silhouetted by the moon.

At last, spent, the two collapsed into each other’s arms, Corbett embracing the woman tightly before releasing her.

“God save the queen!” the woman cried out in a final rush of excitement, then she let one of the children guide her back to her blanket.

Corbett cocked his head, as if wondering if he heard correctly, then took a bowl of tea proffered by Shan, mixed in the Indian style with milk and sugar. The American sipped cautiously, grinned, and drained it before speaking. “My grandparents used to do that dance when I was knee high,” he explained. “Though there should be bagpipes and fiddles. It was a Scottish reel.” He seemed to consider his words a moment. “Damn me. A Scottish reel,” he said again, in disbelief, then wandered out into the darkness, wonder on his face.