Beautiful Ghosts (15 page)

The dancer wore a thatch of long grass tied around his forehead, obscuring most of his face. Only a vest covered his torso, and more grass had been fastened around his waist with a length of twine. Grass was stuffed into his pants legs. He was chanting as he danced, not a mantra but an old song, a gnarled branch in one hand. Suddenly the dancer raised the branch over the head of the child, who emitted a high-pitched sound. Shan had taken a step forward before he realized it was not fear, but laughter he heard.

It was Dawa, he saw with great relief, exclaiming with glee as Lokesh danced around the fire. Beside her sat Liya. Lokesh was telling the girl about Milarepa, the sainted hermit, acting out one of the saint’s songs, in which his sister discovers him in his cave, his skin turned green after eating only nettles for years.

With the energy of a much younger man Lokesh leapt off the ground and landed in a crouch in front of Dawa, he and the girl both laughing. He was pulling the grass from his clothes as Shan appeared. “Buddha be praised,” the old Tibetan said in greeting, a surprised smile on his face.

“Uncle Lokesh has been teaching me about old things,” Dawa announced in a sober tone after greeting Shan.

“There’s
tsampa,
” Lokesh said, referring to the roasted barley flour that was a staple of the Tibetan diet. “We can reheat some.”

“I would like that,” Shan said, suddenly realizing he was famished. As Dawa retrieved a small pan from among the rocks he studied the rest of the campsite. A big wooden packframe leaned against a boulder, beside a blanket strewn with objects. He could not see all the blanket’s contents in the dim light but noticed a small bronze deity statue, a long narrow metal container that may have held pens or brushes, and a hinged wooden box, open, that held lengths of heavy twine and huge needles, the kind used for sewing tents. Liya followed his gaze. “Just some old things,” she said, and kicked the edge of the blanket with her foot, covering its contents.

But not all were old. Shan also had seen a small metal compass, a folding knife, a heavy nylon rope, and metal clips, the kind used by mountain climbers. She had not had them at Zhoka.

Shan accepted a battered metal plate heaped with steaming tsampa and began eating with his fingers. After a few mouthfuls he asked if they had seen any of the hill people.

Lokesh stroked the white stubble on his jaw, looking toward the southern horizon. “I found Dawa last night, at midnight, sitting on a rock gazing at the moon, talking to her mother a thousand miles away. At dawn we found a stream, in the morning searched the slopes for others. Many of the herders were going home this morning, taking other trails to stay far from Zhoka. But Dawa insisted on going further south. This afternoon we met Liya. Dawa says we should go even further south. She keeps asking if I heard the crying.”

“Crying?” Shan asked. “You heard it, too?”

Lokesh sighed and looked into the fire. “I don’t know if I did. I said maybe it was when Liya was coming up the trail toward us. She had the look of one who had been crying for days when we met her, but Dawa said no.”

Shan stood and stepped to the edge of the circle of light cast by the fire, trying to understand what it was about Lokesh’s words that confused him. Liya. They had been walking from the north and met Liya coming from the opposite direction. She had been farther south, had returned with a new pack on her back, new supplies that seemed of no use to them. Away from the glare of the flame Shan saw shapes on the horizon, black against the sky. The mountains looked like crouched beasts. Go further and there’s fleshcutters and bluemen, the herder had warned.

He quietly began speaking of what he had learned in Lhadrung, studying Liya’s face as he spoke, not mentioning the mantras she had secretly delivered to all the hill families. Her eyes were dark and swollen. She had indeed been grieving. “Are you scared to speak the name of a god?” he abruptly asked her.

“Yes,” she said readily. “In all my life I have not said it. No one has, since that day.”

“But now outsiders come and ask for it. I think they were asking Surya about how it looked, how it was to be painted. Why?”

“You must not speak of those things, not in these hills.”

“Not even to help Surya?”

“Not even Surya would—”

Stones rattled on the trail above the camp. Dawa moaned and huddled closer to Lokesh. A figure tumbled into the small circle of light cast by the fire, falling headfirst toward the ground, barely avoiding slamming his skull onto a rock by throwing his hands out.

“Buddha’s teeth!” Lokesh muttered, then grabbed a flaming stick and stepped over the fallen man, toward the trail. The sound of gravel being kicked by running feet came down the slope.

Shan darted to the stranger’s side, pulling on his shoulder, helping him into a sitting position. The left side of the man’s face was heavily bruised. Blood trickled from his mouth and from several small cuts on his cheeks. A rivulet of blood had run down his neck, and now was dried and cracked.

Shan grabbed another burning stick and ran to Lokesh’s side. Someone had brought the injured man to them and fled. He remembered the American’s handlamp still in his pocket, and pulled it out to illuminate the slope above.

“Oh,” the stranger said as he saw the anxiety on their faces, “it’s all right. There’s no one.” His voice was small and quivering, though somehow assured. The man stood and leaned against a boulder, turning his face away from the fire as if shamed by his wounds. He glanced at Shan. “He saw it was you and left.”

As Liya threw more wood on the fire, and Lokesh began dabbing at the man’s wounds with a cloth, Shan suddenly recognized the man. “Is Surya safe?” he asked quickly. It was the angry beggar from town who had taken Surya’s apple. The informer. There was new movement at the edge of the camp. Liya was quickly loading her pack.

“He stopped speaking, except for his mantras.” The man pushed Lokesh’s hand away. “He keeps getting smaller.”

“Smaller?” Shan asked.

“It’s what happens when things inside dry up,” the man said with a knowing tone. “My mother knew a man who killed his wife. The police didn’t do anything, but he kept getting smaller and smaller until one day he just disappeared.”

Dawa appeared at Lokesh’s side, holding the metal plate, now filled with warm water. Lokesh rinsed the cloth, and the man frowned. “I don’t need that. I need food.”

As Shan stepped toward the pot with the tsampa, he looked for Liya. She had disappeared.

A minute later, as the man began gulping down tsampa, Shan squatted by his side. “Who did this to you?”

“You’re the one called Shan?” the man inquired.

Shan nodded. “Who hurt you?” The man had not been seriously injured. It was more like he had been slapped repeatedly.

“It’s okay. Just what herders do when they find me,” the man said.

“Someone in town sent you,” Shan suggested. “From the government.”

The man nodded, then squatted by the fire with his plate, looking into the flames. “I have to help them. My name is Tashi.” He spoke as though it was just another job, as if it were his expected role in life to regularly inform for the government, and be regularly beaten for it by other Tibetans.

“Why?” Shan asked. “Why do you have to?”

“My mother is old and sick. I have to stay close to town. I have no other way to make money to help her. Once I worked in a factory. Now this is what I do.”

As he set the plate down Shan saw that two fingers were missing from his hand. “You have been guiding the groups into the mountains for Ming,” he said.

“Not anymore. They got angry when I couldn’t find a cave.”

“A pilgrim’s cave.”

Tashi nodded.

“If you found it, what would they have done?”

“I found others before. They are scientists. They have special procedures. First they call Director Ming. He must be the first inside, because he is the most expert on how to preserve old things.”

“What did he do when he went inside?” Shan asked.

“Once he came out with an old book. Another time there was only an old Buddha painted on the wall, and a sacred well. The army came and sealed it with explosives.”

Shan cast a worried glance at Lokesh. Ming wasn’t seeking shrines for his research. He was searching for something and then preventing others from seeing the shrines he investigated. “Was Ming in the mountains two nights ago?”

“Ming and the beautiful one with red hair. Punji. I help her find the children who need help. I watch her sometimes when she doesn’t know.” Tashi seemed compelled to tell all his secrets.

“What made it so urgent that he take Surya the next day, why send soldiers to look?”

“Because he didn’t find one that night, but he learned that someone else had.” Tashi extended his plate for more roasted barley. Shan opened his mouth to press him but suddenly understood. In her sudden, unexpected encounter with them, Liya had told Ming and McDowell that monks would be at Zhoka, and they had assumed that someone else had access to monks, was somehow using Surya or another monk. He recalled Ming’s reaction to the cigar stub. Ming seemed to think he had competition in his quest in the mountains. A competition of godkillers.

“You said you came to see me?” Shan asked.

Tashi nodded, but he grew silent and distracted. “I don’t like leaving town. I hate those helicopters. First time up, I wet myself. I never would have found you if that herder hadn’t ambushed me. And at night, too. So I couldn’t see his face. Then he agreed to take me to you for only half the money Ming gave me for the purpose. For me,” he declared in an oddly whimsical tone, “it has been a lucky day.”

It was Shan’s turn to stare into the fire. The man was a self-confessed informer but grateful he could not report on the identities of the hill people. He had arrived in the helicopter Shan had seen, the one that had taken Yao and the American. “Did you tell the message, the one you brought for me. Did you tell the herder?” Shan asked.

Tashi shrugged. “I tell everyone everything if they ask. It’s how I stay alive. My mother needs me. He didn’t ask.”

“And what was so important that they would bring you into the mountains?”

“The helicopter was coming anyway, to pick up those policemen. It goes out every day now, into the mountains in the morning and back to pick up the teams at night.”

“What was so important?” Shan asked again.

“I was outside the colonel’s office, because they wanted to know if the old beggar had said anything. Colonel Tan was speaking on his radio with that Yao, arguing. Yao was at the ruins and sounded furious about something you did. Director Ming was with him. They don’t know I heard. Ming said the reward would mean you were brought back to Lhadrung soon. The colonel said no, that you would know to stay away now, that you had buried yourself deep in the mountains by now. Then Yao said something on the radio I couldn’t hear and the colonel got on the phone with someone for a long time. After a while Director Ming appeared and took me to a conference room. He said I had not been helpful enough to him, that to show him I could be helpful I had to get you.”

“Why would he think you could do that?”

“Because of the words I was to speak.”

“What words?”

Tashi looked up with an uncertain grin. “That if you come back down into the world to help them, they will bring you your son.”

*   *   *

For the first quarter hour Shan ran in the darkness toward Lhadrung, slipping, falling on the loose sharp gravel. His pants tore. He felt blood trickling down his shin. Then he halted, catching his breath, trying to calm himself, leaning against a rock as he looked toward the stars, thinking he should say something to his father but not knowing what.

He had sat under the stars before leaving the camp, unable to understand, but unable to control the wild emotions Tashi’s message had triggered. After several minutes Lokesh had sat beside him.

“It is some kind of trap,” Shan had murmured. “They can’t know where my son is. I have to stay. I have to find a way for Surya to come back to us, make sure they take no more monks.”

“When I was young,” his old friend said, “I heard my mother say to her sister that once you have a child it isn’t just your own deity that resides inside you, that there is something new, that your child becomes like an altar. I never understood then. I thought it was strange, that she meant something about worshiping children. I forgot about it until the year I spent in prison with my mother.” Lokesh referred not to being with his mother, who had died before the Chinese invasion, but to the year he had dedicated to meditation on his mother, in honor of her, when he had tried to recall every event of their life together, sometimes offering stories to the other inmates, sometimes staying silent for entire days, immersed in memory.

“If I go back to them, to that inspector I met, to the colonel, they will try to force me to help them with whatever they are doing in the mountains. They will demand I help them find another monk from the mountains.”

Lokesh gave no sign of hearing him. “I realized one night what she meant,” he continued. “She meant that a parent honors his or her deity through their children, that your child is part of the way you worship.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Don’t stay in the mountains because of Gendun or Surya. They will follow the path of their own deities. Go to the valley because your son needs what only you can provide. Hold that in your heart, and no matter what happens, you will have done the right thing.”

The memory of those words calmed Shan now. If nothing else the news from the informer had cracked open a door in his mind that had been too long sealed, the entrance to a chamber that held images of a timid little boy walking with Shan in city parks, of a baby cradled in his arms, a baby who, impossibly, was his offspring, even scenes of his son sitting with lamas and other images that existed only in his fantasies. At times in prison such images had helped him stay alive. But when, a year before, Tan had brutally reported that his wife had divorced him and remarried, doubtlessly telling their son Shan was dead, Shan had slammed the door shut, vowing to himself never to enter the place again, for only pain resided there. That pain had flooded out now, but so, too, had a desperate, ridiculous hope.