Eliot Pattison - Water Touching Stone

The man stood and nodded solemnly. "We will ransom a goat, Rinpoche," he said. "Our old priest, he would tell us to ransom a goat." Removing an animal from those readied for slaughter, usually by marking it with a ribbon around its ear, was a way of placating the deities that predated the Buddhists in Tibet.

"Then certainly," Gendun said with a somber tone, "ransom a goat."

As Jowa readied the truck, cranking the old engine to life and moving it onto the road, Shan looked up to see Gendun move back around the rock. He followed and found the lama seated on the grass, looking to the south, toward central Tibet and the hermitage where he had spent nearly his entire life.

"I fear it has already begun," the lama said, gesturing for Shan to sit beside him. "We have entered it, but we are too late."

"Entered what, Rinpoche?" Shan asked.

The lama looked over the mountains and sighed. "It has no name," Gendun said. "The home of demons who would seek to kill children." His voice was like shifting sand.

It was not an actual place, Shan knew, but a state of mind that Gendun spoke of, a place in a soul full of hate, a place a man like Gendun could never understand.

"It's a lonely land," Gendun said as he surveyed the windblown plateau. "It's where I was born," he declared.

"Here?" Shan asked, following the lama's gaze. "In the changtang?" Of all the wild, remote quarters of Tibet, the changtang plateau was the wildest and most remote.

Gendun nodded. "In the shadow of the Kunlun mountains. But when I was young, Xiao Shan, my parents gave me to monks because war came, and the monks took me to Lhadrung." Xiao Shan. Gendun used the old Chinese form of address for a younger person, the way his father or uncle might have called him. Little Shan. The lama looked toward a black cloud moving along the slope of the mountains, a snow squall perhaps. "I remember a happier place. Now-" the lama gestured toward the track and sighed, "now I think this road will take us to a place you should not be, Xiao Shan." It had the sound of an apology. What Gendun was saying was that so many murders meant the government would be involved. "I know how it is between you and the other Chinese," the lama said.

Three days earlier, Shan had returned with fuel for a campfire in time to overhear Jowa pleading with Gendun to send Shan back. "He was never released officially, just given permission to be free in Lhadrung County," the purba was explaining to the lama. "Outside Lhadrung he is still a criminal, an escapee. They can check things." When Gendun had not responded, Jowa raised his voice. "They will take him behind their jail," he said in an impatient tone. "They will put a bullet in his head. And the rest of us will be guilty of harboring a fugitive."

"Would you imprison us all with fear, then?" Gendun had quietly asked Jowa, then nodded as Shan approached with his armful of dung chips.

"It's just the government's way of honoring me," Shan had observed with a forced grin, thinking of the monks and lamas in the gulag who sometimes thanked their jailers for providing them with such an unrelenting test of their faith. The conversation had ended there, and Shan had dropped his own idea of asking Jowa to take Gendun back. Certainly Shan knew what the government would do if it captured him. But he also knew what it would do with Gendun, who did not simply have no official identity, but was practicing as an outlawed priest. There were special places for people like Gendun, places without light and heat, places where they sometimes did medical experiments, places where Party psychiatrists attempted techniques for molding grateful new proletarians out of reactionary priests.

I know how it is between you and the other Chinese. Gendun was not just referring to the physical danger. Shan remembered their last lesson together, as the two sat on a rock outside the hermitage. For four months Gendun had been speaking to him about how release from prison was a relative thing, how three years of slave labor had made scars on his soul that would never fully heal, how the greatest danger to Shan was acting like an escapee, for an escapee was only a prisoner without a cell. When the lama had reluctantly suggested that the quickest way to recover would be for Shan to leave China, to go to a new land, Shan had shared with him a letter from a United Nations official dated two months earlier, offering to sponsor Shan for political asylum in the West if he would be willing to give public testimony about the slave camps and Beijing's systematic destruction of cultural artifacts. If Shan could get out of China. They might find a way out for him, said the purba who secretly brought the letter, but it could take a year, maybe two.

Shan extended his hand, still stained with the boy's blood. It was how they often spoke to each other, not with words, but with gestures and symbols. Children are dying, he was saying, and Gendun nodded in sad understanding. If Shan left now, he would never, no matter how far he ran, escape the haunting image of the dying boy, staring at him in silent, terrified confusion.

"The way that is told is not the constant way," Gendun said. The words had become something of a personal mantra between them since the first days they had spent together, when they had discovered that the words were not only in the Buddhist teachings of Gendun's life but also in the Taoist lessons of Shan's boyhood. Together they had recognized that Shan's path was far from anyone's constant path, that the withered spirit he had brought from China had for now found new roots in Tibet but, when the dead pieces were trimmed away, some of the old roots remained, tangled around the new. The way that is told is not the constant way. Gendun had sensed it too when sitting with the dying Muslim boy. They were on a path for which there was no map.

Jowa honked the horn on the truck. Gendun seemed not to hear. Shan saw that his hands were clutched together, the palms cupped as though cradling something.

The lama extended his hands, and as Shan offered his own hand, palm upward, Gendun dropped something into it. A feather. A two-inch-long feather, delicately patterned in brown and black at the base and snow white along its top half, the end faintly mottled with black spots, as if someone had sprayed it lightly with ink. Gendun watched, fascinated, as it drifted onto Shan's palm, then rose and walked to the truck.

Jowa drove the ancient truck relentlessly, as if being chased, bouncing over washouts, sliding in and out of deep ruts, stopping with an abrupt shudder when small boulders, released from the slope above, appeared before them in the illumination of the parking lights. Jowa refused to use the headlights. Soldiers sometimes patrolled the mountains at night.

Shan had put the feather in the gau he wore around his neck and now, as the truck lurched through the night, he sat with his hand around the gau, thinking. Was it a clue? A bidding of good fortune? As he looked at the dying boy in his mind's eye he realized that no, it may have been just a token of beauty to be carried as he moved closer to the ugliness of murder.

Hours later, as Shan and Lokesh climbed into the rear cargo bay after pushing still another boulder aside, Jowa joined them. He checked the barrels lashed to the metal frame of the bay. Most were filled with salt, a vital trading commodity of the region, taken from the salt beds of the central plateau that had supported trade in the region for centuries. Directly behind the cab, under a pile of oil-stained canvas, were two empty barrels, the barrels where Shan and Gendun would hide if they were stopped by a patrol. This was their third truck, for twice they had had to cross over ranges on horseback, led by guides who would speak only to Jowa. Each of the trucks had contained similar salt barrels and two empty ones, with skillfully made inserts that allowed three inches of salt to rest on top once the barrel was occupied. The cover of salt traders might be sufficient for Lokesh and Jowa, who had their papers, but Shan and Gendun would have no chance unless they hid.