Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Director Ming’s discoveries are too important for us to wait for the return home,” the woman declared. “He wants a draft sent to Beijing this morning.”

“I wasn’t aware he had made his discoveries yet,” Shan said.

“If someone had been assassinated here,” Yao observed, “we would have known about it.”

“State secret,” the woman replied. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” she asked in a patronizing tone. “The way the local population has cleverly concealed the truth.”

“But no one has been assassinated,” Shan pointed out.

“The missing amban was killed by reactionaries right here in Lhadrung,” Ming’s assistant stated. “We are going to correct the history books.”

“The nephew of the Qian Long emperor?” Yao asked. “It’s been centuries.”

“It makes no difference. The people’s justice knows no bounds.” The woman frowned as she saw the skeptical expressions both Shan and Yao wore, as if deciding her audience was not sophisticated enough to understand. “This is vital work. The final copy will be circulated to the full team later this week,” she said and dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

Outside, they searched the army vehicles until they found a small utility truck with the keys in the ignition, then Yao climbed in behind the wheel. “I never asked where we are going,” Yao said.

“I’ll know when I smell it,” Shan explained.

Now, as they entered town, Shan rolled down his window. Five minutes later he directed Yao to park the truck two hundred feet down the road from a small complex of mudbrick buildings. As they approached the buildings, Yao began to slow, lagging behind Shan, his hand over his mouth and nose. The stench of human waste was almost overpowering.

“So far the main secrets of Tibet you have shared with me seem to be a charnel ground and this place,” the inspector observed. “No doubt next we’ll be tunneling into a garbage heap.” He waved Shan on.

Shan passed a line of battered bicycles, each with heavy wire racks mounted on either side of the rear wheel, then three sturdy wooden carts with a heavy U-shaped front handle, designed for two people to step inside and push. As he stepped into a shadow of the first building a woman appeared, a yoke on her shoulder, balancing two large clay pots. A brown crust extended down the side of each pot. A man in a coat that was so tattered it seemed about to disintegrate appeared behind the woman and headed for the row of bicycles. The sun was rising. After dawn large ceramic pots of night soil would be waiting behind houses and tenements all over town, to be transported to the fields as fertilizer, an occupation as old as China itself.

“I came to see Surya,” Shan said to the woman. “The old monk.”

The woman gave a bitter laugh. “We have no monks. Look in the mountains. Look in the prison.”

“I mean him no harm. I am a friend of his.”

The woman did not speak but reached into one of the carts and produced a long wooden ladle. She dipped it into one of the jars lined up behind the building and it came out dripping with a brown sludge. Shan took a step forward. The woman flung the contents of the ladle at him. As he stepped to the side the sludge landed where he had been standing. From behind him he heard Yao curse. Shan held his ground. Two more women appeared, each grabbing a ladle, each filling it with night soil. “Chinese!” one of them hissed, and flung another ladle of waste at him. Splatters hit his shoe.

“You want to give us shit, leave it on your doorstep,” one of the others barked. Shan glanced behind him. Yao had retreated to the truck. He heard a murmur of alarm among the Tibetans and turned to see them lowering the ladles. In the rising light they had recognized the military markings on the truck.

“Surya came down from the mountains,” he tried again. “He was asking for alms. Tell him it is Shan.”

The first woman disappeared around the corner, returning less than a minute later. “He says he knew a man who once knew Shan,” she announced in an uncertain voice.

Shan ventured forward a step. When no one reacted, he pushed past them into the yard of the little compound. Surya sat on the stone wall of what looked to be a central well. Three small children sat in front of him. Behind them half a dozen men and women, dressed in the soiled, tattered clothing of the gatherers, stood before what appeared to be an old stable. Shan glanced about the compound. Sleeping pallets had been pulled outside to air. A blackened kettle sat on a smouldering fire. The gatherers didn’t just work from the compound, he realized, they lived there, shunned, no doubt, by the rest of the town.

Surya seemed not to notice when Shan sat beside him. He was making a small doll out of dried rushes, tied with straw.

“Rinpoche,” Shan said, “we must go back. They need you. They are frightened for you.”

Surya absently looked up, not at Shan, but to his own side, then over his shoulder, as if to see whom Shan spoke to.

“Gendun. Lokesh,” Shan said. “They need your help. There are things that have to be understood at Zhoka.”

Surya’s eyes slowly found Shan’s. “I am sorry, comrade, you have mistaken me for someone else. Our fragrances sometimes confuse strangers.” The children laughed. Surya finished tying the doll and handed it to a young girl.

“You met Director Ming at the old stone tower. Did he ask about the death deity?”

“He met a young Chinese, a great abbot. No one can understand the great one’s ways,” Surya said. His voice had a strange absent quality to it. “The abbot makes beautiful paintings, holy paintings, with one finger, one word.”

A cold shudder passed down Shan’s spine. Surya was still speaking of his prior life in the third person. “Why is Zhoka so important to Ming?” he pressed. “Is he one of the thieves you feared?”

“The things that are important at Zhoka seem to be different, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

Surya lifted his head and grinned, exposing a row of crooked yellow teeth. “Whether you are Chinese or Tibetan,” he said and chuckled, the sound rasping over his dry throat. “Comrade,” he added, and laughed again.

Shan pressed his hand to his forehead in frustration. He was not speaking with Surya. The man in front of him was truly different, the way Lokesh had said people become different when struck by lightning. “If I don’t know the secrets how can I protect the lamas?”

“It is not secret. It just has no words. It cannot be explained between people, only between deities.” The words that rushed out of the old man’s mouth seemed not to belong to him this time. He looked deeply confused, almost shocked. He touched his tongue with a finger, and something in him seemed to sink, as if disheartened.

Shan stood and took a step toward the stable. Two of the men sitting there stood, blocking the entry to the building.

Shan turned back toward Surya. “What happened to Kwan Li?” he asked.

Surya made a strange spiraling motion toward the sky. “Something wonderful.”

Shan studied him a moment. His mannerisms had changed from the monk Shan knew, his face seemed to have new lines in it, his eyes even had a different, sadder, more callous glint. “What was hidden at Zhoka?” he asked.

Surya shrugged. “That is for the monks to know.”

“You are a monk.”

When Surya shook his head there was a new emotion on his countenance. Not sadness. Pity, as though he felt sorry for Shan. “He might have discovered it if he had stayed there. But,” Surya said with a sigh, “he died at the festival.”

Shan reached into his pocket and handed Surya the paintbrush he had kept there since the festival day. “The only one who died was Lodi,” Shan explained, fighting to keep his helplessness from his voice. “The one you saw in the tunnel. He was a thief. I think you saw him stealing. There was an argument, perhaps, an accident,” he ventured.