Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

Shan had become a connoisseur of fear, learning to appreciate its many textures and physical reactions. There was a vast difference, for example, between the fear of the torturer's bootsteps and the fear of an avalanche descending on an adjacent work crew. And none compared to the fear that kept him awake nights as he searched through his miasma of exhaustion and pain, the fear of forgetting the face of his father. In the first days, during the haze of hypodermics and political therapy, he had come to realize how valuable fear could be. Sometimes only the fear had been real.

The khampa had deep scars, blade marks, on his neck. His mouth curled with cold scorn as he spoke. "Colonel Tan, they said," he growled, looking about for acknowledgment. "No one told me this was Tan's district. From the Thumb Riots, right? The biggest son of a bitch in an army of sons of bitches."

For a moment it seemed as though no one had heard, then a guard suddenly leaned through the flap and slammed his baton against the man's shins. A grimace of pain twisted the khampa's face, fading into a spiteful laugh as he made a small, twisting gesture toward Shan, as though with a knife. With studied disinterest, Shan shut his eyes.

As the flap was tied shut behind them and the truck groaned into movement, a low murmur rose in the darkness. It was nearly imperceptible, like the sound of a distant stream. During the thirty-minute ride to their camp, the guards were in the truck cabs, and the prisoners were alone. The fatigue in the squad was almost palpable, a weary grayness that dulled the ride back to camp. But it did not relieve the men from their vows.

After three years, Shan was able to identify the men's malas, their rosaries, by sound. The man to his left fingered a chain of buttons. On his other side the bootleg mala was a chain of fingernails. It was a popular device: one let the nails grow, then clipped and collected them, until reaching the required one hundred and eight, on thread pulled from blankets. Some rosaries, made only of knots tied from such thread, moved silently through callused fingers. Others were made of melon seeds, a prized material that had to be carefully guarded. Some prisoners, though, especially the recent arrivals, were more concerned with the rituals of survival than the rituals of Buddha. They would eat such rosaries.

With each seed or fingernail, knot or button, a priest recited the ancient mantra, Om mani padme hum. Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus, the invocation to the Buddha of Compassion. No priest would recline on his bunk until his daily regime of at least one hundred cycles was completed.

The chants worked like a salve on his weary soul. The priests and their mantras had changed his life. They had made it possible for him to leave behind the pain of his past, to stop looking back. At least, most of the time. An investigation, he had said to Chang. The words had surprised him more than they had the lieutenant. Old ways died hard.

As fatigue pushed his consciousness back, an image pounced on him. A headless body, sitting upright, fidgeting with a gold cigarette lighter. The figure somehow took notice of him, and reluctantly extended the lighter toward Shan. He opened his eyes with a gasp, suddenly short of breath.

It was not the khampa who was watching him now, but an older man, the only prisoner with a genuine rosary, an ancient mala of jade beads which had materialized months earlier. The man who used it sat diagonally across from Shan, with Trinle, on the bench behind the cab. His face was worn smooth as a cobblestone except for the ragged scar at the left temple where a Red Guard had attacked him with a hoe thirty years earlier. Choje Rinpoche had been the kenpo, the abbot, of Nambe gompa, one of the thousands of monasteries that had been annihilated by the Chinese. Now he was kenpo of the People's 404th Construction Brigade.

As Choje said his beads like the others, oblivious to the lurching of the truck, Trinle dropped a small object wrapped in a rag into his lap. Choje lowered his rosary and slowly unwrapped it, revealing a stone covered with a rust-colored stain. The old lama held it reverently, studying each facet, as if it held some hidden truth. Slowly, as he discovered its secret, a great sadness filled his eyes. The rock had been drenched with blood. He looked up and met Shan's stare again, then nodded solemnly, as if to confirm Shan's sense of foreboding. The man in the American jeans had lost his soul there, in the middle of their road. The Buddhists would refuse to work the mountain.

As the trucks pulled to a stop inside the compound, the rosaries disappeared. Whistles blew and the canvas was untied. Through the gray light of dusk the prisoners plodded in silence into the squat plank buildings that housed them, then quickly emerged with the tin mugs that served each man as wash basin, food plate, and teacup. They filed through one side of the mess shed to have their mugs filled with barley gruel and stood in the dusk, coming to life as the warmth of the gruel reached their bellies. Prisoners silently nodded to each other, offering tired smiles. If anyone spoke, he would be sent to the stable for the night.

Back in the hut, Trinle stopped the new prisoner, the khampa, as he moved across the room. "Not here," the monk said, pointing to a rectangle drawn in chalk on the floor.

The wiry khampa, apparently familiar with the invisible altars of prison barracks, shrugged and moved around the rectangle to an empty bunk in the corner.

"By the door," Trinle announced quietly. He always spoke in the same worshipful tone, as though in awe of his every waking moment. "Your bunk would be by the door," he repeated, and offered to move the man's kit.

The man seemed not to have heard. "Buddha's breath!" he gasped, studying Trinle's hands. "Where's your thumbs?"

Trinle cocked his head toward his hands. "I have no idea," he said with a tinge of curiosity, as though he had never considered the question.

"The bastards. They did it to you, didn't they? To keep you from your rosary."

"I still manage. By the door," Trinle repeated.

"There's two empty bunks," the man snapped. He was no priest. He leaned back on the straw pallet as though challenging Trinle to move him. The fiercest resistance fighters ever to oppose the People's Liberation Army had been those from Kham. They were still being arrested in the remote ranges for random acts of sabotage. Outside, a khampa from the southern clans, who had resisted the army long after the rest of Tibet was subdued, was still prohibited from possessing any weapon, even a blade of more than five inches.

The man removed one of his tattered boots and with great ceremony removed a slip of paper from his pocket. It was a sheet from one of the guards' tally pads, which sometimes blew open in the wind. He held it up with an exaggerated smile and pushed it into his boot for added insulation. Life in the 404th was measured by the thinnest of victories.

As he rewrapped the rags that served as his socks, the new arrival studied his cellmates. Shan had seen the routine more times than he could count. Each new prisoner first looked for the chief priest, then for the weak who would make no trouble. For those who had given up and those who could be informers. The first was easy. His eyes quickly settled on Choje, who sat lotus fashion on the floor beside one of the central bunks, still studying the rock in his hand. No one in the hut, no one in the entire lao gai brigade, emitted such serenity.

One of the young monks produced a pocketful of leaves, sprouts of the weeds that had begun to emerge on the mountain slopes. Trinle counted them out and distributed them, one leaf to each prisoner. Each of the monks accepted his leaf solemnly and whispered a mantra of thanks toward the man whose turn it had been to risk punishment for gathering the greens.