Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

The Tibetan woman produced a pair of surgical scissors and cut the bindings that held the first paper together and unrolled it. She read it quickly then tossed it into a bucket below the table. She raised a scrap of cloth and examined it with a magnifying lens for a moment before discarding it as well. As she did so the oily young Han Shan had seen earlier at the barrow picked up the bucket and replaced it with another, empty. He clowned with the bucket full of prayers, amulets and relics, balancing it on his head a moment, drawing a laugh from one of the guards who leaned languidly against the wall, then headed across the yard.

With a chill Shan saw his destination, a steel barrel in which a fire burned. Two guards flanked the barrel. They were more alert than the other soldiers. They had obviously noticed how the Tibetan prisoners watched the barrel. Some stared in anger, some in fear, some with tears streaming down their faces.

Shan stared at Ming as he stepped back inside the building. Ming was not just destroying small figurines, he was destroying the place where, for many families, reverence and hope resided. Many of the altar figures, especially those packed with prayers and artifacts, had been used for generations. What was burning in the barrel were the prayers of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the link of reverence that connected them directly to ancestors who had lived centuries before. In some families, there was a custom that each member contributed at least one prayer during their lifetime, secret prayers that sometimes took years to compose, like works of art. It was their chain of compassion, unbroken for centuries, an old woman had whispered once to Shan when, seated at their family altar, she had explained the custom. Unbroken until now, until Director Ming had arrived from Beijing in his strange quest for a fresco and an official who had been missing for two centuries.

The Han youth stopped ten feet from the barrel, lowered the bucket, and lifted a rolled prayer into the air, extending it overhead for all to see. Then with a quick, exaggerated motion, like that of a basketball player, he flung the paper in a long arc into the burning barrel. Some of the guards cheered. He repeated the performance, then he unrolled a prayer, waving the nearly three-foot-long paper into the air. Shan stepped forward, slowly maneuvering through the crowd as the youth took a second paper and unfurled it, waving the papers like streamers, mimicking the streamer dances popular in Chinese parades.

Shan reached the bucket and scooped it up, taking a step toward the burning barrel as if to help.

“You!” the youth growled at Shan. “Old man! I’m not done!”

Shan feigned surprise, spun about, the bucket leaving his hand, propelled outward by a quick thrust, so it landed among the seated Tibetans, ten feet away, spilling its contents.

The trusty glared at Shan but said nothing. He was trying to gauge Shan. Shan was not Tibetan, did not wear the rough blue clothes of a trusty. But one of the prison guards at the barrel seemed to recognize Shan. He was at Shan’s side in an instant, and just as quickly slammed the butt of his rifle into the back of Shan’s knee.

Shan collapsed, and found his hands covering his neck, an instinct he had acquired during his years in the gulag.

But no blow came. The guard retreated. The Han trusty continued his strange dance, swirling his streamer, kicking dirt at Shan, then with a final flourish deposited the two prayers into the fire. When Shan looked up he was staring into the moist eyes of a Tibetan woman, who clutched her beads with trembling fingers.

“In some parts of China,” he said quietly, in Tibetan, “people burn prayers as a way of delivering them to the deities.” The woman nodded her head and offered a sad smile. He saw she had retrieved one of the fallen prayer rolls and held it tightly in her other hand. Near his fingers lay another. He pushed it under her leg, out of sight of the guard who was trying to collect the contents of the spilled bucket. The soldier returned no more than ten of the old prayers to the bucket, then straightened, cursing, and emptied the bucket into the flames.

“Lha gyal lo,” a hoarse voice called out from the crowd.

“Bzzzz,” the young trustee offered in reply, flapping his arms like wings as he mocked the Tibetans. “Bzzz. Bzzzzzzz.”

The sound of a heavy door opening and shutting at the far end of the main building interrupted the performance. The guards and trusties fell instantly silent as a slender red-haired figure appeared. Elizabeth McDowell, clad in tee shirt and blue jeans, appeared from the shadows with a bucket and a dipper, moving toward the Tibetans in the courtyard. The angry young trusty seemed to forget what he was doing and just stared at the British woman. Her eyes were swollen, her gaze lowered to the ground. No one moved, no one spoke as she left the water bucket with the Tibetans and stepped back inside.

As she did so Shan saw Yao standing by the main door, arms akimbo, glaring at him. Shan started back across the yard.

Inside, Ming was at the table, interviewing an old man. A soldier was videotaping the interview. The old man was shaking. His words came out in sobs. “There are no treasures left. There are no deities left.” He scrubbed his eye with a trembling hand. “The age of deities is past.”

The wave of emotion that swept through Shan was so powerful he felt nauseous. Hand on his belly, he stepped back out of the room.

No one stopped him when he stepped through the gate out of the compound past the vehicles parked along the wall. The soldier who had picked up Yao and Shan on the road, Tan’s sergeant, was sitting against the rear wheel of his truck, asleep. Shan walked a hundred yards down the dry, dusty road to the edge of the woods and settled against the trunk of a hemlock facing the far side of the valley. He could see the steep rugged slopes, miles away, that stepped upward toward Zhoka. Gendun was there somewhere, and Corbett, and Lokesh, all in danger because of thefts in Beijing and America. He stared at the ground in front of him, trying to calm himself, trying to forget for a moment the torment on the faces of the Tibetans Ming had detained.

Shan found his hands driving his fingers into the soil on either side of him, as if something inside was struggling to hold on. He kept them in the soil and closed his eyes again. After what seemed a long time, he caught a whiff of ginger, a passing scent from some door that had come ajar in his memory. With a sad smile he cupped his hands and lifted them, depositing each handful of sandy soil in front of him. Leveling the two small piles he drew with his finger, without thinking, letting his unconscious direct his hand as his father had shown him, as a meditation technique. After a moment he saw that on the first little platform of soil he had drawn a figure like an inverted Yinside a large U,with a long tail. On the second he had drawn a more complex figure, which he absently traced again with one finger.

“What do they mean?” a quiet voice asked.

He looked up into the green eyes of Elizabeth McDowell. “Nothing,” Shan said, and moved to erase them.

“Please don’t,” she said, and knelt beside him. She had been crying. “They’re old ideograms. What do they say?”

“My father used to use them, like poems,” Shan said after a moment, pointing to the inverted Y,“This is the sign for human, and this”-he outlined the Ushape, “means a pit. A human falling into a pit. Together they mean misfortune. Disaster.” He let the words sink in a moment. “I know Lodi was your cousin. I am sorry. He was also a criminal.”

“Not much of one,” McDowell said. “He had too big a heart. Like a Robin Hood.” She looked up. “I’m sorry. Robin Hood was-”