Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

But as Shan retreated several steps, the girl followed him. He lowered himself onto a rock and after a moment’s hesitation the girl sat beside him.

“Is it all right?” she asked him in a timid voice. She had switched to Chinese.

“All right?” Shan replied in Tibetan.

“May they do this?”

Suddenly Shan could not bear to look into the girl’s face. When he did not answer the girl began to nervously wipe the flour dust from her cheeks.

He reached out and gently pushed her arm down. “They did not have to ask me.”

“You’re Chinese.”

He recalled a day five years earlier when soldiers had heaved him from a truck into the gulag compound near Lhadrung. He had lain facedown in the cold mud, semiconscious, not knowing where he was, bleeding from one ear, pain spiking from his arms and belly where electroshock clips had been fastened, his eyes and mind struggling to focus because of the interrogation drugs still in his system. “From this day forward, your pain will subside,” a quiet voice had suddenly whispered, and Shan had forced his eyes open to gaze into the serene face of an old Tibetan who, Shan soon learned, was a lama in his fourth decade of imprisonment. “In all your life it will not be so bad again,” the lama explained as he had helped Shan to his feet. But during the year since his release Shan had discovered a new pain that not even the lamas could cure, an agony of guilt that could be triggered by the innocent question of a young girl.

He put his hand on the girl’s arm to stop her. “I wish the Dalai Lama was with his people,” Shan said in a near whisper. “I wish him a long life.”

“You mean you’re Buddhist?”

A bowl of buttered tea was thrust over Shan’s shoulder.

“Something like that.” Lokesh chuckled and squatted before them, sipping a second bowl. “When I was young,” he continued, gazing solemnly at the girl, “my mother would take me deep into the mountains to see old suspension bridges over bottomless chasms. The bridges connected us to the outside world. No one knew how they were made or what held them up. They seemed impossible to build. When I asked, my mother said they were just there, because we needed them. That is our Shan.”

“But is it all right?” the girl asked Shan again in her meek, earnest tone.

“What is your name?” Shan asked.

“Dawa. My father is a model worker in a Chinese factory,” she added quickly. “He saved all year to be able to send me here. He could afford only the bus fare for me. I have never been out of the city.” Shan glanced at Lokesh. Listen to the little girl, Surya had said as if in warning. But Dawa did not even know Tibet.

“Dawa, I want it to be all right. Do you want it to be?” Was that Surya’s point, Shan wondered, that they could only understand the day’s strange events by looking on them as an outsider?

The girl shyly nodded, searching Shan’s face. “How can a Chinese do such things?” she asked. “Be a bridge. Does he mean you are part Tibetan?”

“Other Chinese put me in prison, not because I committed a crime but because they feared I would tell the truth. I wanted to die then. I was going to die. But Lokesh and others like him taught me how to live again.”

The girl seemed unconvinced. Shan lifted a jar of flour and extended it toward her. She slowly shifted her gaze to the jar and then, her fingers trembling, she pulled some flour from it. A shiver of excitement seemed to course through her, then she threw the flour over their heads and solemnly studied it as it drifted downward. “I saw where they go. I think I know the way to the hidden land,” she declared uncertainly, looking at Surya, who had risen from his seat beside the younger chanter and was now moving across the yard in a slow, graceful gait.

Shan looked at her, not understanding, then watched as the girl followed the monk into the ruins. A sudden unfamiliar sound caused him to turn toward the chorten. Laughter. Several of the older Tibetans were laughing, throwing flour over each other’s heads. The festival was truly under way.

But then a hand closed around his arm. Liya was at his side, her face pale. She gestured with her head toward the old stone tower on the ridge above the ruins, nearly a mile away.

At first Shan saw nothing but then something green at the base of the tower moved and his heart leapt into his throat. There were soldiers at the tower, at least a dozen. He quickly surveyed the yard. No one else had noticed that the army was watching. If the Tibetans were warned they would panic and try to flee, though most lived to the west, above the valley, and their path home was now blocked.

“You have to tell him,” Liya said. “You have to try,” she added in a forlorn tone.

Shan slowly nodded, watched as Liya disappeared into the nearest alleyway, then gazed upon the joyful Tibetans. They may have finally forgotten the hard existence they eked out of the rocky slopes, forgotten the fears that always shadowed them, but their jubilation would be short lived. He began searching for Gendun.

He found the lama five minutes later, sitting in a small clearing at the northern edge of the grounds, looking into the five-hundred-foot-deep chasm that abutted the northern edge of the ruins. Strangely, Gendun sat with his legs casually extended over the edge of the chasm. He was watching a hawk soar in the updrafts above the gorge, his eyes shining with pleasure. He did not turn but patted the rock beside him, inviting Shan to sit. “I have not known such a day since I was a boy,” the lama said. “We would erect a white tent by the monastery in the mountains where I was born. We sang all day. The monks would fasten a secret blessing to the top of a high pole and we would take turns climbing, trying to retrieve it.”

“There are soldiers,” Shan said quietly, studying the tattered lines of ropes and splintered wood that hung from the edge of the opposite side of the chasm, the remains of the old bridge that had once connected to the clearing, the northern foregate yard of the old gompa.

As though in reproach, Gendun turned his head to gaze toward a long stone atop a low mound of rubble, a lintel stone from over a collapsed doorway. Someone had cleared the rubble from it, exposing words that had been painted across it, faded but still legible. STUDY ONLY THE ABSOLUTE. On the lintel stood a framed portrait of the Dalai Lama and a fragment of a life-sized bronze statue, a graceful, upcurved hand.

“Once this would have been a festival day for all the people,” Gendun said. His voice was like dry grass rustling in the breeze. “We are making it so again. This is the beginning.”

For Gendun it was the beginning, but Surya said it was the end. Shan looked back at the legend on the stone, then searched Gendun’s face carefully. The old lama’s countenance could be as complex as the sky. His eyes had grown more sober. He would not abide talk of dangers to the monks, or of murderers or foreigners stalking the hills. Shan replayed in his mind’s eye the scene of Gendun looking at Atso. The lama had not been surprised, had not expressed remorse, but offered words of rejoicing on seeing the old man’s body.

“Rinpoche, I do not understand what is happening,” he said at last, using the form of address for a revered teacher.

“We do not just dedicate the shrine today,” Gendun declared. “We are rededicating the gompa. Zhoka is going to live again. Surya is going to reside here.”

Something icy gripped Shan’s belly. Surya and Gendun did not understand the tyrannical, often vengeful nature of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, to whom an unlicensed monk was a criminal. They did not know Colonel Tan, who had the authority to condemn the monks to labor camp without a trial.