Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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As they left the building they discovered a new visitor. Tenzin was standing in the smoke of the samkang, his eyes closed, as if trying to be washed by the purifying smoke. They watched as his eyes opened and he stepped toward the child, who showed signs of exhaustion. With a gentle motion of his hand Tenzin offered to take over, and the tall silent Tibetan took up the repetitive motion as the girl stepped away with a grateful nod, not letting the wheel miss a single rotation. Shan and Lokesh had passed by a remote house in western Tibet where an old man and his wife turned a similar prayer wheel, salvaged from a ruined gompa, spinning it in four hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. They had been doing so for ten years because, they solemnly explained, when they had turned the wheel for twenty years the deities would become so pleased they would bring the Dalai Lama back to Tibet.

Lokesh touched Shan's arm and nudged him away, around a corner of the building, so as not to disturb Tenzin. They left him spinning the wheel, the girl sitting against the wall of the lhakang, the solemn Tibetan exchanging a tiny smile with her.

The sheep of the caravan were lying contentedly along the bank of the small stream that flowed through the juniper grove, watched over by the mastiffs and Anya, sitting beside Winslow, who lay napping in the thick grass. They found the Yapchi villagers by the small house built against the wall, standing by the open door with bowls of tea. To Shan's great relief the monk was sitting upright on a straw pallet inside the simple structure, a bowl in his hands, attended by Nyma and the caretaker, who stood with his back to Shan, speaking in low, gentle tones as Nyma washed the monk's wounds.

Shan turned and silently stepped out of the doorway and around the corner of the house, where he found Lhandro on a roughhewn bench set against the wall studying his map. As he approached the rongpa Nyma rushed around the corner. "It was him!" she cried. "That dobdob! He says he was meditating when a huge man appeared, a crazy man dressed like a demon, with blackened cheeks. He began beating him for no reason with his long staff, and threw fire at him." The nun stared at Shan with a confused, frightened expression.

Lhandro called out to one of the Yapchi men, who darted to one of the horses and rode away. Even here, in the wild, remote Plain of Flowers, they needed to guard the chenyi stone.

"How would he know?" Lhandro asked. "That demon follows the eye as if it speaks to him."

Not follow, Shan thought. The dobdob had come from the hermitage to the Plain of Flowers ahead of them, as though he had known they would come this way. Had he caused the avalanche that blocked the pass, to be sure they would detour across the plain? Had he attacked the monk and burned the plain in an effort to stop them, or slow them? Or had he been waiting and felt the need to slake his appetite by attacking another of the devout?

"Lokesh said a dobdob enforces virtue," Nyma said in a low voice, as if scared of being overheard. "But this one attacks the virtuous. It's like he's the opposite of a dobdob, or some dobdob crazed with evil."

She looked from Lhandro to Shan for an answer, then sighed when both men stayed silent. "At least he's going to be all right," she said as Shan sat down on the bench. "His eyes are clear. He is hungry. His name is Padme. He told us where his gompa is," she added, as Lhandro produced his map and she pointed to a dot labeled Norbu at the end of a road that extended east to the north-south highway. Lhandro traced his finger from the dot to a point a few miles below them on the plain, then outlined a trail that led east along the high slope above them, north into Qinghai Province, toward Yapchi Valley. "We have heard of this Norbu, one of the gompas permitted to open five years ago. My father wants me to go there some winter, to bring back blessings. It would be only ten miles off our path. Five of us will take him tomorrow– four to carry the blanket, one for relief." He fixed Shan with an uncertain gaze. "We can't leave a monk in the wilderness," he added in a plaintive tone.

"We can't," Shan agreed, and looked over the ruins. Tenzin had not emerged from the reconstructed buildings where he had been turning the prayer wheel. It was the first time the mute Tibetan had not departed with his leather dung sack as soon as they made camp.

"You take him," Shan said, "let me go on to the Yapchi Valley alone. Lokesh and I."

"Impossible," Lhandro protested. "The chenyi stone– the caravan. We are entrusted to escort you."

"I fear what could be there waiting," Shan said. "The Colonel. His mountain commandos. They know where the eye came from originally. They must know that is where it will return."

"It is our home," Lhandro declared with a determined glint. "I live in the house built by my family generations ago. I will not let soldiers keep me from my home."

"You must understand something," Shan said in a sober tone. "Bringing the eye back now is more likely to cause your people harm than good."

"No," Lhandro insisted, the doubt gone from his voice. "Of all the paths that are possible, that is not one of them. We must take the stone back, at any cost, even if it means facing the army, or that dobdob. We will get rest tomorrow, then-"

Lhandro was interrupted by the appearance of a Tibetan woman in a frayed red tunic with a long yak hair belt and several heavy turquoise and coral necklaces around her neck. She cast a worried glance at Shan, then looked back toward the house. "You should go tend those sheep," she said in a low, hurried voice.

Lhandro stood, looking with alarm toward the flock. The sheep lay peacefully on the banks of the stream, a hundred yards away.

The woman glanced back at the fire, where two children tended a small bellows. She lived here, Shan realized, was probably the caretaker's wife.

"I'll go with you to your sheep," the woman offered. "We should go now."

Lhandro took a step forward, staring at the animals again.

"Not you," the woman said to Lhandro pointedly. She was wringing her hands.

Shan stood, not understanding either the woman's words or her nervousness. "Do you need to speak with me?"

"No," the woman began, then groaned as the caretaker appeared around the corner of the house. He was a big-boned man, slightly taller than Shan, wearing a broad-rimmed brown hat and one of the wool fleece vests favored by the dropka. He froze, glared at Shan with a look that seemed to be something like horror, then came at him like a bull, not speaking, giving no warning as he abruptly shoved Shan back into the bench, slamming him against the wall so hard the wind was knocked out of him.

"No one asked you here, Chinese," the man spat with cold fury. "You're not welcome."

Shan stood on wobbly knees, trying to regain his breath. The man slammed him back against the wall. Shan felt dizzy. He became aware of the woman running away toward the fire. He heard the sound of a horse cantering and saw movement in the direction of the trees.

Lhandro put a hand on the man's arm but the caretaker twisted and hit the rongpa with an elbow, in the process knocking his own hat off. Shan stared at him in confusion. The caretaker was Chinese.

"Take your murdering ways and leave!" the man spat. "There is no room for blasphemers!" As he stepped toward Shan with his fist raised, a horse wheeled to a halt in a cloud of dust and in a blur of speed its rider launched from the saddle onto the caretaker's back. It was Dremu, throwing his arm around the man's neck, pulling him backward, twisting, forcing him to the ground.

The woman screamed. The caretaker pulled a chisel from his belt and, still sitting on the ground, lashed out at Dremu as the Golok leapt back and crouched, hands floating in the air, as if about to spring again. As Shan stood Nyma appeared, then Anya, crying out in alarm. Suddenly Dremu's knife was in his hand.

"It is not the way, father," a patient, youthful voice called out. The boy who had first run to bring the caretaker from the reconstruction site repeated the words as the woman pushed the boy forward, as though the boy were the only means she had to stop Shan's attacker.

The hand holding the chisel seemed to droop. The caretaker seemed unaware of Dremu now. He looked venomously at Shan then back at the boy.

"These two men," a calmer voice declared from behind Shan. "They found me when I lay wounded on the plain." Shan turned to see the monk at the corner of the building, leaning on Lokesh.

The caretaker seemed to go limp. He looked at the monk, the woman and the boy, and folded his arms around his knees, dropping the chisel to the ground. He pressed his head into his knees. After a moment he looked up with a sullen, resentful expression at Shan, then turned to Lhandro. "You should have told me a Chinese was coming," he spat, but there was more sorrow in his voice than anger.

The boy stepped cautiously to the man's side and extended an arm to help him up. For a moment, as he rose with the boy's help, the caretaker seemed old and unsteady, then his eyes flared again and as he retrieved the chisel and replaced it in his belt he fixed Shan with a baleful stare.

"He's not one of-" Lhandro began, searching for words. "He's like you, Gang."

The man reacted with a resentful snort, as if to say no one was like him, but, as his son took his hand, he seemed to deflate again. His gaze drifted toward the ground and he let the boy lead him back across the compound.

Shan staggered to the bench and sat down, then watched as the man walked toward the shrines. Gang. It meant steel, a name given by members of what his father would have called the Mao Cult during one of the Chairman's fanatical campaigns for steel production more than four decades earlier.

"My husband is not-" a strained voice started near Shan. He turned to see the woman with the child beside him. "Gang isn't like that…" Shelooked toward the strange angry man and seemed about to cry. "My husband built those shrines," she offered in his defense, then asked the boy to bring Shan a bowl of tea. "It's taken him nearly ten years."

Lhandro stepped past Shan to help the monk back inside. "Gang has bad memories," the farmer said in an apologetic tone, looking at Shan, then the monk. "I'm sorry. I had not seen him in years. I had forgotten that." Bad memories. It was a catch phrase, another part of the odd language developed by all those who had lived under the shadow of Beijing, a way to explain the torment suffered by those who had been caught up in the bloody terror that nearly annihilated their world.

The caretaker Gang had bad memories. But of what? Shan had never heard Tibetans speak of Chinese having bad memories.

"I've read reports of the rumor in the mountains, about a Chinese who builds temples," the monk said in a weak but smooth, well-educated voice. He looked across the field of ruins at the caretaker, who was nearly at the reconstruction site. "But up here," he said in a quizzical tone, shaking his head. "We never thought the rumors were true. No one comes up here. The winds are so cold. We thought this was just ruins and wilderness." He put his hand against the wall, as if suddenly dizzy, and Nyma helped him back to his pallet.

Gang's wife collapsed onto the bench beside Shan. "He came with the People's Liberation Army, a teenager then, in 1964." The woman quickly explained that Gang had arrived as a young corporal with the occupation forces and after serving his term had accepted land from the army, and won a bonus for marrying a Tibetan woman. "It was my sister he married," the woman explained in a sad tone, "and they settled near the northern road to Amdo. They had a son and there was much happiness. Gang became a Buddhist. Once, when his son was very sick, a medicine lama from Rapjung gompa came and saved the boy's life. After that, Gang came to help the lamas with the special herb plantings whenever he could, always a week or two in spring to ready the earth and a week in the autumn to help with the harvest and drying.

"But then those children came" the woman continued, "after they had destroyed Rapjung. The Red Guard," she said ominously. "Gang's wife had feared for our father and went with their son to help the family flee into the mountains. But the Guard caught up with them. They held a trial on the spot and condemned the family for being members of the oppressive landowner class." She glanced at Shan and looked toward the ground. "Those judges pronounced sentence and made my nephew carry it out," she said in a near whisper.

Shan's head slumped down. He held it, elbows on his knees, fighting a choking sensation in his throat. The woman meant the Red Guard had forced the young boy to execute his mother and grandfather.

"Then they took that boy away," she added in a hollow voice.

Such survivors of political undesirables, if not killed immediately, had often been sent back east to special political indoctrination schools, so they could join the Chinese proletariat. "We never saw him again."

"They say Gang went crazy," Lhandro continued the story, "that he started ambushing and killing Red Guard. No one knew for certain. But the Red Guard became scared of certain places in the mountains and began pulling back from the area. The sister of his wife returned," he said with a sad glance at the woman, "and was assigned to the collective that took over their old family estate. Gang came down from the mountains after a couple of years and worked there. Eventually they became husband and wife. When the collective broke up they came here, to be alone and because of the debt Gang felt he still owed the healers who had lived here." Lhandro cast his look of apology toward Shan again. "I forgot about Gang and his problem with the Chinese. We never…" His voice drifted away.

Nyma completed the sentence for him. "In Yapchi we never had a Chinese friend before."

By the next morning Padme was alert and talkative, hungry enough to eat two bowls of tsampa.

"You saved my life," the injured monk said to Shan and Lhandro several times. He sat by the fire, a blanket over his shoulders against the chill morning wind, sometimes intensely studying the reconstructed shrines, making notes in a pad he kept in his belt pouch, sometimes staring at the flock of sheep that grazed by the stream. "But I don't understand why you bring your herd here," Padme said to Lhandro. His gaze fell upon Winslow, who was walking along the stream.

"We were going north when we found you," Lhandro said. "You could not travel so we sought water and shelter."

"That young girl with you, she said those bags the sheep carry are filled with salt." Padme kept staring at the American as he spoke.

Lhandro nodded. "From Lamtso."

The young monk searched Lhandro's face. "That is a very old thing," he said in an odd, uncertain tone. It almost sounded like he was chastising Lhandro. "It could be contaminated if you just take it from the soil."

Lhandro looked at the monk, perplexed, even worried, wondering, Shan knew, if in all their years without monks the Yapchi farmers had forgotten something important. "It is good salt," the rongpa said. The monk shrugged, and accepted another bowl of tea from Gang's wife.

"But there are rules about salt. There is a government monopoly on salt," the monk said in his tentative voice. "I would hate to see you accused of-" he paused, then shrugged and did not complete his sentence. "If there was no caravan I may not have been found for many hours." He turned and gazed at Shan.

"Why?" Shan asked. "Why were you on the plain? Were you expecting to meet someone?"

Padme explained that he and a group of monks from Norbu sometimes roamed the lands neighboring their gompa looking for religious artifacts. They had not visited this remote plain before and when they arrived upon it they had realized that they would need to split up if they were to explore it all. Padme had walked to the far end of the plain and had just come upon a small cairn and was examining the area when he was attacked by the giant with the staff.

"Did you see who left this?" a deep voice interjected in Mandarin. Winslow appeared in front of them, holding the yellow vest left by the American woman. "Did you see an American?"

"No," Padme replied slowly. "It was just there. By that little cairn."

The American sighed and handed it to the monk. "Take it. Might as well do someone some good."

Padme extended his arm hesitantly, dropped his blanket, and pulled on the vest. "Has this foreigner been gathering salt, too?" he asked Lhandro in Tibetan.

"Just along to enjoy the fresh air," Winslow quipped in Tibetan, and the monk stared at him, his eyes wide with wonder.

"An American who speaks Tibetan?" he exclaimed, and looked back, with intense curiosity, at Lhandro and Shan, as though the news somehow changed his perspective on the party.

They would stay at the ruins until the next day, Lhandro announced, while the Yapchi men probed the surrounding land by horseback. The next morning the caravan would continue north while some of the party returned Padme safely to his gompa. The monk expressed his gratitude and led the Yapchi villagers to the base of the wall, out of the wind, where he sat to lead them in mantras to the Compassionate Buddha.

A quarter of an hour later the Yapchi riders trotted away, each in a different direction. Nyma stepped to the door of the house, speaking to someone inside, then bent to tighten the laces of her shoes. Gang's wife appeared and pointed to a worn dirt path that ran along the outside edge of what had been the outer wall of the old gompa. No, not to the path, but to someone on the path: Tenzin, walking at a slow, contemplative pace toward the far end of the ruins.

"A kora," Lokesh said as recognition lit his eyes. It was a pilgrim path. Many old shrines and gompas had such a kora, for circumambulation by pilgrims as a way of acquiring merit and paying homage to those who resided there, or had resided there.

"Past the wall at the north, to an old hermit's cave," Gang's wife explained, gesturing past the reconstructed buildings as if the wall still existed, "then up past the drup-chu shrine," she said, meaning a shrine by a spring of what the old Tibetans called attainment water, believed to impart blessings and health on those who drank from it. Lokesh bent and tightened his own laces, looking up expectantly at Shan. Shan grinned and stepped away to retrieve a water bottle from the stack of blankets by the wall, where the caravan party, except Dremu, had slept. The Golok, as usual, had chosen to sleep apart, hidden somewhere, but close.

When he returned Lokesh was staring in confusion at Lhandro, Nyma, and Anya. The three Yapchi villagers had begun to walk down the kora path, but to the east, to the right, in a counterclockwise direction. Lokesh twisted his head in curiosity. From behind Shan heard a disappointed sigh and saw Padme in the doorway, bracing himself with an arm on the frame, staring after the trio.

"Why didn't we know this?" Shan wondered. Only as Lokesh turned to him did he realize he had given voice to his question.

Lokesh smiled. "There are many paths," he said, with a satisfied tone. Many paths to enlightenment, he meant. Traditional Tibetan Buddhists, no matter which of the major orders of Buddhism they worshiped with, always conducted themselves clockwise along a kora circuit. It was part of the tradition, meaning part of the reverence to be shown.

But there was another faith in Tibet, older than Buddhism, based on animism. The Bon faith, though it had been largely subsumed into Buddhism and followed most of its teachings, still had its distinctive practices; one of which was that kora pilgrims walked counterclockwise.

"We should have known," Shan said, answering his own question. It might explain much, especially why the farmers of Yapchi clung so fervently to their hopes for the stone eye and their land deity, why they had been so forlorn for four generations over its fate.

As Shan and Lokesh started the clockwise circuit, Lokesh began quietly reciting one of his pilgrim's verses. Minutes later they heard footfalls behind them and turned to see Winslow running to catch up. He extended the bottle he kept for water, now empty. "I need attainment." He grinned. "Boy, do I need attainment."

Two hours later they had completed three-quarters of the path and stood at the drup-chu shrine on the slope above the gompa, Winslow filling the water bottle after each of them knelt and drank deeply from the tiny spring of sacred water. Shan and Lokesh had passed many pleasant hours at such springs in their travels, pursuing Lokesh's burning interest in understanding the particular reason each of the springs was special. Lokesh was fond of pointing out that just understanding such reasons would tell much of the story of Tibet. Like many, he believed the land was not sacred just because devout Buddhists had inhabited it for so many centuries. The land drew them to such springs, Lokesh often declared, and every spring had a tale not just of the devout Buddhists who had identified it, usually centuries earlier, but of the ancients who had come before. At a spring in central Tibet that had been surrounded by crushed rock and gravel amid what were otherwise slopes of solid granite, Lokesh had decided that thousands of years earlier, when air deities traveled in the form of giants, the giants had favored the spring and crushed the earth by landing beside it so often.

As they rested by the spring Winslow scanned the Plain of Flowers with his lenses.

"Have you decided what they were doing, why oil geologists would be out on the Plain of Flowers?" Shan asked.

Winslow didn't lower the binoculars, just shook his head slightly. "The oil concession ends at the Qinghai border, at least five miles north of here," he said and glanced back at Shan. Dremu had found empty cans of American food, on the far side of the plain, even farther from the concession.

"Why would she leave a vest and sleeping bag?" Shan wondered out loud.

"I don't know," the American said in a hollow voice. "Maybe the thing that attacked Padme found her, too. Maybe it's not sure who has the stone eye, and it's just attacking anyone on the northern trails." He packed his binoculars and knelt at the spring a moment, dipping in his cupped hand once more. He studied the water in his palm, lifted it and emptied it over his head. He closed his eyes and let the water drip down his head, and when he opened his eyes Shan saw a flash of deep emotion. Desperation, he thought, or profound sadness.

"There was a letter from her, to her mother, in the company files," Winslow said abruptly, as if the water had freed the memory. "Her manager showed it to me, he hadn't mailed it because he wasn't sure if it would be too painful, their not knowing for sure about her. He said the company instructed him to open it, to see if she had been suicidal. Her mother is a professor in Minnesota. They talk about things in their letters, I guess." Winslow stared into the water, or past it, as if he were speaking to something below, at the underground source of the sacred water.

"I mean big things. She said she wished all of her assignments could be in Tibet, that although the Chinese wouldn't say so, Qinghai Province was really Tibet, that people in the mountains were teaching her things. She said she loved Tibet but was hating what the company was doing to the land. That Tibetans told her that the most important thing for maintaining the human life force was connection to the land, and that the world had become divided between people whose lives were severed from that life force and people who lived close to the land. That those who lived close to the land had a sacred duty to protect the life force." Winslow looked up from the water. "And she worked for an oil company." Something like pain seemed to cross his face again, as though the paradox had been deeply troubling him.

"At the end of the letter she said that some Tibetans had told her that a geologist was really like a special kind of monk who studied the behavior of land deities." Winslow looked back into the dark patch where the spring emerged from the earth, as if waiting for such a spirit to emerge and explain. "She said her Tibetan friends wanted to take her to hidden lands." He turned to look at Lokesh. "What did she mean?"

Lokesh needed no time to consider his reply. "A bayal. They meant a bayal. It means hidden land. Some people believe there are hidden portals to special lands, like heavens, where deities roam freely." He glanced at Shan. Some people. Like the followers of Bon who lived at Yapchi. Lokesh sighed, then stood and stepped with a deliberate pace to a low pile of rocks ten feet from the spring. Although Shan expected him to add a rock to the pile, Lokesh began pulling the pile apart, until he had exposed a square of solid granite, two feet to the side. "There was a little chorten here," he said in an urgent, awed voice, as if the memory had just washed over him.

"A shrine with a relic underneath, the foot bone of an old hermit who had walked all over Tibet collecting herbs, more than five hundred years ago." He stared at the square stone and the way it was encrusted with lichens that joined it to the ground. "The Tibetans who did this," he said excitedly, meaning those who had been forced to destroy the gompa, "didn't move this base, didn't move the relic." Lokesh looked up with a hopeful gleam. "We would sit here for lessons sometimes, and the lamas would explain how the spring was connected to the center of the earth. They would wash herbs in this water and send clay jars of it to healers all over Tibet. I remember listening for hours here while Chigu Rinpoche taught us how the power of plants came from the power of the earth and their power to heal came from the ways they connected humans back to the earth."

Winslow stepped to the slab, knelt reverently by Lokesh, his eyes wide with wonder. "I read somewhere that doctors say they could heal anything if they just knew how the human animal evolved, how to trace the human body back to where it rose up out of the mud. Because everything we're made of came from the earth." When he looked up at Shan his eyes held a strange fervor. "It's a different way of saying the same thing, isn't it?" He placed his fingertips near the lichen of the rock, but not on it, as though it were too holy for him to touch. Then he looked up sheepishly and began helping Lokesh to replace the stones, not in a pile, but in a square, like the base of a chorten.

After they had laid the first layer of stones Lokesh paused and picked a sprig of the plant that grew around the stone slab, looking at it quizzically. "Chigu Rinpoche said that the whole function of the healers was to translate the power of the earth into the life force of the human."

Winslow studied Lokesh a long time, then slowly picked up a rock and continued building the little stack of rocks as Shan began carrying more stones from the slope above them.

Lokesh paused again. "We learned how to dig roots in the reverent fashion here, at this spring, learned how to push aside the soil a little at a time, taking time to coax the earth, always leaving some so the plant could grow back. Chigu Rinpoche said we learned about ourselves by digging into the soil. He said we should dig inside the earth to find the earth inside us." Lokesh raised some soil in his hand and let it trickle into his other palm. "It was a teaching mantra he used. Inside the earth, for the earth inside."

When they had finished Lokesh nudged Shan and pointed toward the top of the ridge above the ruins. "People are up there," the old Tibetan announced.

Shan studied the slope and saw nothing except a large black bird circling high overhead, riding the updraft. Winslow glanced up the hill with a skeptical expression, then scanned the top of the ridge with his lenses.

"You see them?" Shan asked in a slow, careful tone. His old friend's senses, like his emotions, were usually in a delicate balance. What he might have sensed was a memory of people on the slope, decades earlier, or perhaps he had seen the back of a fleeing antelope. Not infrequently Shan had followed his old friend when Lokesh had sensed the presence of a spirit creature, only to sit and contemplate a rock where Lokesh insisted the creature had taken refuge.

Lokesh rubbed his grizzled jaw then turned with a sheepish grin toward Shan and continued down the trail. Shan silently followed, knowing that once they completed the circuit they would be climbing back up the slope.

An hour later, after having returned to the camp and consumed a meal of cold tsampa rolled into balls, they were nearly at the top of the slope when they paused at a flat rock that overlooked the long plain. Winslow, who had refused Shan's suggestion that he remain at the camp and rest, pointed to two small clouds of dust at the southern and western ends. "Those scouts from Yapchi," the American said.

"The Tara Temple, the Maitreya Chapel, the Samvara Temple," Lokesh said suddenly, and Shan saw that he was pointing at empty places among the ruins, speaking of what he had seen, or maybe still saw, at the gompa. "The chora," he said, referring to the debating courtyard, "the inner herb garden, the north garden, the north kangtsang and the bark-hang," he added in a contemplative tone, referring to a hall of residence and the printing press.

Lokesh's finger hovered in midair as if he had forgotten something. "All those prayer flags in the trees," he said in a distant voice. "It's like a festival."

Shan looked back down on the ruins. There were no prayer flags except for a single modest strand by Gang's shrines, and no trees except the small juniper grove outside the gompa grounds. Lokesh was in another time, another place. Shan was never embarrassed for his friend, or fearful of his sanity. But today Shan felt a certain envy for the old Tibetan.