Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Suddenly someone clenched his arm from the side. “What is your need?” a stern voice asked. He twisted about to see one of the older soil carriers, a man with a wrinkled face and cracked spectacles.

“I came because of the holy man,” Shan said after a moment. The man’s grip tightened.

“He was the one who gave him the brush that day,” a woman’s voice said from the darkness, and the man released Shan. He sensed motion in the shadows, and the darkness in front of him seemed to open. It was a heavy felt blanket hung from wall to wall, obscuring the back half of the stable, which was filled with Tibetans of all ages, some seated on pallets of straw, some on the dirt floor. A cone of incense burned on an upturned bucket to the left, a small makeshift altar with seven cracked porcelain bowls stood at the far wall. Between the incense and the altar was Surya, painting. The stable wall had been plastered once and now the plaster was nearly covered with Surya’s vivid images.

“See, it’s the white Tara,” he heard a woman whisper. It was the woman he had seen with the boy. She was pointing at the central figure on the mural, whose delicate face held a third eye in her forehead. “It’s been many years since Tara visited Lhadrung,” the woman whispered, excitement in her voice. The boy’s eyes were wide with wonder.

“You know him from another town?” the old man asked Shan over his shoulder.

“Another town?”

“They say he just does this, all over Tibet, that he goes from town to town, hauling night soil and carrying deities. It is the way some of the old saints lived, someone said.”

Shan turned to study the old man’s inquiring face, then looked at Surya and slowly nodded. “Like a saint.”

“He sat there every night for a week, staring at his brush and the wall, never speaking, leaving each morning with us to haul the soil, barely eating, just coming back to stare as if the wall had something alive in it. My wife says she thinks the wall must be left from the old gompa that was in Lhadrung. People had left him some money when he was begging. One day he came back with some paints and began. He talked a little more after the painting started, like something had been released inside. He said it just needed to be done, that he was just giving color to the deities that resided here. He carries night soil from dawn to noon. He said if he did not carry night soil he would not know how to paint.”

An old woman pushed past them and bent at Surya’s side. “My wife makes him eat twice a day. Otherwise I think he would forget to eat at all.” The woman took the brush from Surya’s hand and helped him to his feet. As he let her lead him away the other Tibetans leaned closer to the painting, and Shan heard a mantra start, the invocation for Mother Tara.

Shan found Surya in the courtyard, eating a bowl of tsampa. He was chewing absently, looking toward the sky with a distant expression, when Shan sat beside him, and he took a long time to notice his visitor.

“I know you,” he said in a raspy voice, and Shan’s heart leapt. “You brought me a brush, a very good one. How did you know?”

“Surya, it’s me, Shan.”

The absent expression returned to the old man’s eyes.

“Surya, you must listen carefully. I know now what happened on the festival day at Zhoka. I saw the man who is paying the thieves. I went inside the underground palace, I was on the ledge above the little chapel where you found the body. You discovered the looters, and they made you angry. You knew they were up above, on that ledge, trying to chip through a tunnel, trying to cheat their way inside. When you saw that they had stolen a fresco your anger made you take the old ladder that led up to the ledge. You took it and threw it in the water, so it went into the chasm. And when you came back you found that man dead, in a pool of blood. You thought you had killed him, that he had tried to step down onto the ladder but it was gone and he had fallen to his death with the chisel, which pierced his body. But you didn’t. He was attacked on the ledge above, with a chisel, because he was trying to stop those who were breaking into the mandala temple.” Shan still saw Dolan’s wild eyes, when he had refused to leave the thankga with the American. Using monks doesn’t stop us. We proved that, it didn’t stop us from pushing the right buttons. No doubt Dolan had ordered Lodi killed, from Seattle, just as he had ordered McDowell killed, by pushing the buttons of his phone.

“Then he was thrown down, left there to die. You had nothing to do with it.”

Surya’s expression did not change.

“You’re listening,” Shan said. “Something in you is listening, I know that. You didn’t kill a man, you can go back, you can put your robe back on.”

The old Tibetan looked into his hands a long time, then gazed with sympathy into Shan’s face. “You have a kind face,” he said. “I am sorry for your friend who moved that ladder.” He sighed. “But you know souls aren’t killed by physical action. A soul isn’t burned away by the killing itself, but it can be by the fire of hate that precedes it, even by discovering a long life has been wasted.”

Abruptly Shan recalled the words Brother Bertram had written. Death is how deities are renewed. As he gazed into the old man’s face he realized at last that it wasn’t his old friend who sat there, that Surya had indeed gone away, that the fire that had raged through the old Tibetan’s spirit had burnt away much of the memories, the humor, the lightness that had made up Surya, leaving a strange innocent reverence, leaving a deity that was Surya and not Surya, a new artist who had to paint different gods, in a different way. And that, Gendun would say, was miracle enough.

He stood and took a step away before trying one more time to reach the old man’s memories. “There is a great struggle for the riches of Zhoka,” Shan said. “People have come from far away to oppose the lamas for it.”

“Such people only fight themselves,” the old Tibetan said. “It is just the way of things for them. Everyone has a different path to the center of their universe.” He set down his bowl and rose. “The nature of earth taming is not in the earth, but in the people,” he said, and paused, questions rising on his face as though he were surprised by his own words. Then, after a moment, he shrugged and stepped back into the stable.

Shan watched the empty doorway, considering the strange words. They had the sound of prophecy.

The haulers had stopped working and were gathered behind one of the rusty tanks, exchanging worried glances when Shan left the courtyard. Colonel Tan was in the street, standing by his car. Tan said nothing as Shan approached, but opened the door for Shan to climb into the front seat. There was no sign of his driver or usual escort, and Tan drove himself, speeding out of town, past the army barracks, never speaking, not even looking at Shan, until they reached the hill above the 404th People’s Construction Brigade. He pulled the car to the side of the road and climbed out, immediately lighting a cigarette.

The big supply tent that had been erected for Ming’s field teams was gone. In its place were two dozen smaller tents, the mobile camp of an army unit. Tan had ordered new troops to the prison. He had brought Shan here as a warning, to remind him of the power he still wielded.

“Do you have any idea who this man is?” Tan said with a strange, almost contemplative tone. “The American who went into the mountains with Ming?”

“He is a criminal.”

“No,” Tan said flatly. “He is one of the richest men in the world. He has been a great benefactor to the Chinese people. He has dined with the Chairman of the Party, has the Chairman’s personal phone number to use whenever he wants. He can speak to the President of the United States.” Tan paused to inhale on his cigarette again, then shrugged. “It is not possible to define him as a criminal. I received two calls from different generals about him, one in Beijing.”