this. You must leave your childhood games behind. You will act like a responsible adult and return to your studies. Or you can return to Beijing and sell noodles on the street. Either way, you are going back tomorrow.” Gao glanced at Shan. “There will be a doctor in the helicopter. And there will be soldiers stationed across the passage to the other side of the mountain until we can find a more permanent way to seal it.” He stood, blew out the candles, and left the room.
The housekeeper showed Abigail and Hostene to their quarters in the tower. Shan studied Abigail’s videotapes again. When he reentered the sitting room Thomas was there, frowning.
Gao’s nephew said in a desolate tone, “I read somewhere that when you are sent to the gulag you gradually forget everything about your life before, that none of it seems real anymore, that your memories become like a movie of someone else’s life.”
“Where you are going is a long way from the gulag.”
“Living in a cage, living someone else’s idea of your life, I think they’re not much different.”
“A gilded cage. There are scores of millions who would gladly trade places with you.”
“So you agree with my uncle. I should just put my dreams on a shelf and let them gather dust.” Thomas looked at the floor. “If you ever return to Beijing, you’ll know where to find me. Just ask for the most highly educated noodle seller in the city.”
“There are professors at the forensics academy who might still accept a letter from me. Give me your address in Beijing and I will write them. Perhaps they will give you special projects even if you are not officially enrolled.”
Thomas quickly wrote out his address.
“How often did you see Professor Natay?” Shan asked as he tucked the paper in his pocket.
“You mean after the murders? Twice, before yesterday. The first time she was working and didn’t mention the murders. She didn’t think I knew about them, so she wasn’t going to tell me. But she was so upset that she almost couldn’t talk. She asked me if I could get her a gun. Then she asked me how tall a Tibetan would have been five hundred years ago. She said she had realized something important-that on a pilgrim trail a sinner could walk beside a saint, that maybe when people died on this mountain it was intended, as part of the kora, as if its true purpose was not to reach the end, but to attain something along the way, to help people reach their next incarnation.” The words cast an odd chill over Shan. People reached their next incarnation by dying.
“I think she may have spoken that way because she was starving. I gave her all the food I had with me. The next time I saw her she was not so upset. She asked what kind of music I liked. We spoke about rock and roll. It was strange in a way that she never spoke about the thing on her hand.”
“What thing?”
“The eye. She had painted a white eye on her hand. It was still there yesterday morning when I saw her. She rubbed it off later.”
Shan gestured toward the bedrooms in the tower. “After a night’s sleep,” Shan said as they climbed the stone stairs, “we can both speak with her. I want to find out exactly what she saw when she returned to the campsite that morning.”
But Shan could not sleep. He left his bedchamber, climbed to the top of the tower, and lay on the cold stone floor, facing the night sky. In another twenty-four hours he and his friends would be free. They could forget Chodron, forget the gruesome murders, go back to the restoration of old manuscripts and day-long meditation among the other secret monks of their hermitage. He began rehearsing the words he would use with Gendun and Lokesh: the violence on the mountain was not of their making, it only affected the miners, who were outlaws themselves. Hostene and his niece were going to be safe. Gendun and Lokesh had a duty to remain safe as well.
But an internal voice grew in volume, intruding on his frail hopes. Gendun would never leave willingly, not with the people of Drango so spiritually distraught. Shan would have to ask Gao’s soldiers to forcibly remove him, and that act would forever stand between them. The way to save Gendun was one that guaranteed Shan could no longer sit at his side.
Many of the monks who had once inhabited Tibet had followed an often terrifying meditation ritual called
He went to a dark, deep place within himself, not exactly meditating but not sleeping, visiting memories, remembering nightmares, unaware of time or place.
It damp inside the tool shed, and the burlap sacks they hung to block the light of their candle were stained with mildew, the scent sometimes mixing so strongly with that of the night soil in the rice paddies outside that he would become nauseous when he entered it. As usual, he sucked a pebble as a remedy for hunger as he waited, arranging and rearranging his shirt so his father would not see how his ribs poked out. Food was strictly rationed at the reeducation camp, and the inmates of the children’s dormitory only received what was left when the field workers were finished. Sawdust was sometimes mixed with the rice gruel, which usually cramped his nine-year-old stomach so severely he had to lie on his bunk, unable to walk.
He passed the time silently repeating the Taoist verses his father had taught him the night before, struggling not to cringe at the small sounds of the night. If he was caught outside he would be caned until the bamboo came away bloody.
There was a rush of movement and the door was flung open and closed. There was a rustling of clothes, the flare of a match lighting a candle, and all hardships disappeared. His father was there, embracing his son, his gentle smile marred by the missing front tooth that had been knocked out in a tamzing. Officially, at the reeducation camp, parents and children were separated. Officially, the punishment for Shan’s father, the professor, would be far worse than Shan’s if he was found to have broken the rules of curfew, the rules against having unapproved books, the rules against candles.
They worked for an hour in the little shed at the back of the rice paddies, reciting the Taoist verses, reviewing another segment of European history then, the best always last, looking over a page torn from the book of poetry from the Sung Dynasty that Shan’s father had secretly, illegally, brought from home. It was their favorite, Su Tung-po, the poet bureaucrat:
Together they wrote the words in chalk on the plank wall of the shed, his father’s hand sometimes guiding him in the strokes of the complicated old-style ideograms. Then they spoke of how they had spent their days, Shan trying not to take notice when his father’s words were interrupted by long hacking coughs. His father let Shan lean on his shoulder as he spoke of older, happier times, so lost in their reverie that neither heard the sounds until too late. They were still sitting in the corner when the handlers burst in, lanterns in their faces, batons lashing out at his father. The last sight he had of his father for a month was of the professor stuffing the poem into his mouth. The next morning Shan had a bowl of real rice and vegetables, even shreds of chicken. Later that day, the political instructors praised his mother for having turned in his father for reactionary behavior. It took much longer for him to understand the bargain she had struck: she had done it in exchange for Shan’s single square meal.
Suddenly he noticed the gibbous moon high overhead. Hours had passed. Inside, the tower was still, lit only by dim bulbs along the stairwell. Hostene’s door, previously closed, was ajar. Shan pushed it open, confirming that the Navajo still slept soundly. But on top of one of his boots was a slip of paper.
Shan hesitated, then with a pang of guilt lifted the paper and took it to the stairwell, where he held it under one of the bulbs. He read it once, then again. He sat down, blinking at the words, confusion burning away his fatigue as he read them over and over:
