Текст книги "Water Touching Stone"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

Fire. If he set a fire, he thought, looking at a trash basket overflowing with paper, maybe in the confusion Jakli and the Kazakhs would be permitted to evacuate without questioning.

"But," Xu Li said tersely, "I am still the prosecutor."

Shan brought his eyes back to the woman. Why was she being so indirect? "I've seen your camp," he said tentatively.

"My chop is on file here. Glory Camp is a resource utilized by many counties in Xinjiang and Tibet."

What game was she playing? Saving him for someone else? Baiting him before moving in for the kill? "I do not doubt you are a zealous guardian of the people, Comrade Prosecutor." He returned her steady gaze.

She extended her mug as though in salute to Shan, then sipped it as she contemplated him. "I have served the people of this county for many years. I am not ashamed of my service. I could have gone back to Beijing when my first tour was finished. I asked to stay. I have received many awards from the Party and the Ministry for the progress we have made here."

He raised his own mug in salute. How, exactly, do you measure progress? he wondered. In the number of citizens sent behind wire? The size of the prison cemetery?

"I believe in the order of law," Xu continued. "I know you have a job. But I must tell you, Comrade, I am not afraid to do my job. I will enforce the law against anyone who breaks it." Xu stared at him malevolently, then abruptly rose and left the room, leaving the door open.

Shan stared after her, dazed. There were spirits in the Buddhist mythology that one might meet while traveling. They would speak in strange words, and they might bare their teeth at you, but if they moved on without eating you, meeting them was considered a blessing.

The workers in the outer office did not look up as he moved through the room. No guards came. No doctors with syringes poised. He paused for a moment, still in shock, until the faces began to turn toward him, then he quickly stepped to the door.

Outside, the limousine was gone. Jakli and her cousins were still asleep. He checked the compartment under the dashboard of the truck and confirmed there was a flashlight, then climbed into the rear of the truck and settled back onto the sacks of rice, gradually falling into a slumber troubled by visions of dead children.

When he awoke it was night. Dim lightbulbs affixed below the speakers of the public address system were the only illumination in the administrative compound. Jakli and the others were squatting by a small fire made of scraps of lumber. They had impaled several small apples on screwdrivers and were roasting them over the flames. Jakli pushed one of the apples onto an oily rag and extended it to Shan.

He accepted the apple and tossed it from hand to hand to cool it. "Did they tell you why the warehouse is closed?" he asked.

"On the orders of Public Security, nothing more. Sometimes they fumigate. Poison gas, maybe."

"I think there are people locked inside."

Jakli shrugged. "This is a prison."

He nodded his head toward the smokestack. "Where did those men go? They were carrying coal." There was no sign of activity at the boilerhouse.

"Gone," Fat Mao said. "We were asleep."

"Why would they need a Public Security guard?"

Jakli's head jerked up. "Knobs? There's knobs here?" She stepped backward, so her face was in shadow. The others looked up, suddenly alert. Her actions needed no translation.

"I saw one." Shan glanced toward the shed, which appeared abandoned. "By the boiler." A wisp of smoke rose from the boiler chimney. The coals had been banked and left to burn slowly. The demand for electricity and heat would be lower at night. Jakli moved to one of the support posts and leaned against it, her eyes sweeping across the compound.

Shan stepped beside her. "And I saw the prosecutor," he added.

"She has much business here," Jakli said, not hiding her bitterness.

"I mean, she spoke to me." He explained the strange encounter with Xu.

Fat Mao pressed close and asked him to repeat Xu's words. "She thinks you're someone else," the Uighur gasped in confusion.

"More precisely," Shan said with a chill, "she thinks I am someone who would be with Kazakhs and Uighurs, a Han working with herdsmen." He looked into Fat Mao's face as he spoke. "A Han whom the prosecutor herself is wary of challenging."

"From Beijing," Jakli added in a low voice.

Fat Mao cursed. "There were six reservations made," he reminded her. "For arrests by knob headquarters. Headquarters uses spies sometimes. Undercover agents."

"What does it mean?" Jakli asked.

"I don't know," Shan said. "Except that the clans of the borderlands are in perhaps even greater danger than we thought. The knobs wouldn't send a spy just to help with the Poverty Scheme. Where else do the clans gather? Where a stranger might find his way among them?"

Jakli thought a moment. "Karachuk. Where Lau died."

Shan nodded. Lau had gone to the desert with her secrets, and someone had infiltrated her place of trust. "Tell me how to go."

"I will take you."

"No. You must return to town. Your probation."

"I made a vow to Lau."

"It is not what Lau would want, to have you back in prison."

"Sure, I'll go make hats," Jakli said in a taut voice. "Bright red hats with beads. Purple hats with sequins. While the children die and Red Stone is ripped apart." She broke away and stepped to the back of the shed, leaning against one of the posts as she gazed into the darkness.

He realized that she was not looking at the compound but at the distant patch of shadow where the white horse was penned. In the distance he could hear its hooves as it nervously pranced about its pen. As he approached her she began a low song in the tongue of her clan. Shan recognized a word, repeated many times. Khoshakhan. The way you tell the animals you love them.

"It's for the horse, isn't it?" Shan asked when she was done.

She started, as though she had not known he was there. "Yes. It says-" She thought a moment. "It says you are made of wind running. I will tie owl feathers in your mane, and we will ride like an arrow into the mountain clouds. My great uncle taught me. He was a synshy– a knower of horses, it means. He could speak with horses."

"You said owl feathers?"

"Owl feathers bring good luck. And wisdom."

Shan realized his hand was on his gau.

"On my naming day, a beautiful black and white colt was born, and my father promised it to me. We grew up together. Zharya was his name. We won races, many races. We went to high meadows and he listened as I played my dombra." There was a whisper behind them, and Shan turned to see that the others were listening too.

"Is he in the Red Stone camp still?" Shan asked.

She made the song again, only humming this time. "No," she said in a taut voice, just when Shan had decided she had not heard. "Once, when I knew an army truck was coming, Zharya and I dragged a heavy log across the road." She took a step away, into the darkness, but spoke again after a moment. "We rode up the mountain and watched from a cliff where the soldiers could never catch us. We were laughing, Zharya and I, standing side by side as the soldiers tried to move the log. Then Zharya groaned and fell down and there was a cracking sound from below. They had shot him with a rifle." She looked back into the darkness. "It took him all afternoon to die. He just lay there with his head in my lap, looking at me like it was all a bad joke."

A gust of wind moved through the silence, a dry, cool wind, smelling of coal dust.

"But you have a new horse now," Shan offered at last.

"That one? Just from the Red Stone herd. I don't have a horse life anymore," she said with great sadness, then climbed back onto the sacks for sleep.

Shan leaned against the pole, watching for another quarter hour, then followed the others onto the sacks. But Shan did not sleep. He watched.

The compound was empty but the lights were on at the guard towers, which switched on spotlights at irregular intervals to sweep along the fence. There was no chance of sneaking through the wire to find the waterkeeper, no chance of searching for Gendun in the special detention barracks. Shan looked back at the boiler. Electricity was still being used. Someone would have to go to the boiler to stoke the coal.

He watched the moon rise and listened to the national anthem played over the public address system to signal curfew. What was the curfew discipline in a lao jiao camp, Shan wondered. Surely it could not be as severe as that at his gulag prison, where questions were never asked. Gulag prisoners caught out after curfew were shot on sight.

He must have dozed, for when he looked up he saw the smoke from the boiler was much heavier. The boiler had been replenished. There was no sign of the workers. He waited another quarter hour, then quietly climbed past his sleeping companions and retrieved the flashlight from the cab. Its batteries were nearly exhausted, its light barely reaching three feet. Perfect for his needs.

Walking slowly, heart pounding, he crossed the compound and circled the little shed by the boiler house. There was a window at the rear. Locked. He put his face to the glass but could see nothing. From the front corner he surveyed the compound. A single vehicle with brilliant headlights moved along the outer wire, a truck on patrol.

Shan waited for the truck to pass along the front of the compound and turn down the far side, then tested the front door. It was open. There were two small rooms. Inside the first was a collection of shovels and rakes and brooms, with a long bundle wrapped in burlap on the floor. Shan had seen such bundles before, in carpet markets. The looms of Xinjiang, especially of this far southwestern corner of the region, had been providing carpets to China and the rest of the world since the days of the Silk Road.

He moved into the rear chamber, which was larger than the first. In rows stacked five and six high were cardboard boxes. Most of them were glued shut, fresh from the factory, but the dim light of his hand lantern revealed their packing labels, in English and Japanese. Radios were inside, and tape recorders, and video cameras. And more than thirty small boxes containing a machine called a disc player. Two airtight metal ammunition cases held bottles of pharmaceuticals, in their original factory packages. Some he recognized as antibiotics, others bore English trade names that meant nothing to him. He pulled a small pad of paper from his pocket and listed the contents of the inventory, then quickly scrawled at the top of the pad, Glory Camp, Black Market Goods.

Preoccupied with speculation over why the knobs had been guarding the goods– were they merely protecting evidence, or were they protecting their investment? -Shan stepped back into the entry chamber and knelt at the carpet, which no doubt was part of the same hoard of goods. The flashlight fell and rolled onto the floor as he leaned over. Not bothering to pick it up, he placed his fingers inside the bundle to feel the density of the weave, for an indication of its value. He recoiled in horror.

A feeble cry escaped his lips as he threw himself backward. His chest heaving, he crawled to the doorway. Cracking open the door, he lay there, gulping in the cool night air to calm himself. It was several minutes before he had steeled himself enough to return to the bundle.

It was not a carpet. He found the flashlight, then folded back the sacking and studied his grisly discovery. A young man stared back at him, surprised and lifeless. His skin was covered with soot, his hair jet black. The body had not been lifeless long enough to be cold. He saw moisture on his own hand and leaned closer. The man's left ear had been severed. It was an old form of torture that had been popular during the Cultural Revolution. When a prisoner refused to divulge information, refused to implicate others with information he had heard, the ear was severed. If you will not share with us what you have heard, then what value are your ears, Red Guard interrogators would shout. The face wore the remains of a grin. The great sadness that had descended on Shan flashed into horror again as he brought the failing light closer to the man's open eyes. They were blue.

He rubbed a corner of the sacking on the scalp and it came away with a greasy black smudge. He smelled it. Shoe polish. He wiped more of the man's scalp, exposing hair the color of broom straw. He dragged a fingernail over the deep layer of soot that covered the man's face, leaving a white track. It was the stranger from the power plant, the American who had taunted him at the boiler.

Lowering himself into the lotus position, he extinguished the light, leaving the room lit only by the rays of the half moon that floated through the open door. It wasn't death that weighed so heavily on him, but that death was so familiar. Since he had left his former incarnation in Beijing, death had seemed to be everywhere. Perhaps it was what one of his teachers had said, that death was the final measurement in the dimensions of souls. Maybe that was what unsettled him so, that death seemed to amplify how incomplete most humans were, and that the closer to death he got, the more incomplete he felt.

Shan did not know how long he sat in the moonlight with the dead man. When he surfaced to consciousness he realized he was reciting a Buddhist prayer for the passage of souls. He sighed and began to unwrap the body of the Westerner, switching on his light again. On the left hand was a line of clean white skin where a ring had been removed. The right hand still bore a ring. Shan eased it off, a simple circle of steel with a crude hatchmark design scratched in its surface, which no doubt remained only because of its negligible value. The pockets of the man's shirt were empty. He opened the shirt. A scar creased the upper right shoulder. A large oval birthmark lay above the right hip.

The man's denim pants bore an American label. Levi's. Their pockets appeared empty. His expensive American hiking boots had been removed. He pushed his fingers to the bottom of the pockets, and from the right rear pocket extracted a rolled up piece of paper pressed against the bottom, where it had been overlooked by whomever emptied the pockets. A series of abbreviations were written on it in English, arranged in five rows. FBP it said, then SBRF, SSCF, TBLF, and on the final line only C.

He knelt at the American's head and stared intensely into the man's eyes, as if he could will them to life again. He knew nothing about the man, except that he had been young, and strong, and jovial. And far from anywhere that might have been called a home.

The knobs did this. The knobs had killed an American, he realized suddenly. What was it the American had done that made him so dangerous? Even for the knobs, killing a foreigner was profoundly dangerous. And what was the American doing that was important enough to risk his life in such a faraway, forgotten place? Sometimes the boot squads brought special prisoners here from far away, Jakli had said, secret prisoners.

Shan slowly rewrapped the shroud, then stood, took two steps, and clutched his chest as the helplessness surged through him once more. He darted outside, moving to the rear of the small building, where he leaned against the wall in his weakness, gulping the fresh night air, trying to purge himself of the smell of death. As he sank to his knees he heard the haunting voice again, as clearly as if the forlorn dropka had been standing behind him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming.

Chapter Six

The turtle truck lurched across the desert like a small boat on a rough sea, rocking and pitching as it broke across the waves of sand. Jakli worked hard at the wheel, frequently adjusting the angle against the dunes, dodging patches of light-colored sand, always warping back in a northeasterly direction, toward the heart of the desert. She had stopped as she had left the road, looking at Shan with a grave expression. "The Taklamakan," she said, gesturing toward the endless expanse of sand. "It's an old word, from before the time of writing. Because so many people have died out here. It means once you go in, you never come out."

But Shan already felt mired in a place with no escape. The American was not his responsibility, he kept telling himself as he gazed at the desolate landscape, not his mystery to solve. He had Lau and Gendun and the dead boys and now the waterkeeper, and he had no room on his back for the dead American. It was only by some grim chance that he had stumbled upon the body. The American had nothing to do with Lau and Khitai. Perhaps his death was part of the strange game between the knobs and the prosecutor or even connected to Ko Yonghong, who had boasted about his American consultants. More likely, it was the work of the boot squads, who brought subversives from all over China to a place like Glory Camp. But still the death of the American hovered near like a dark shadow. He had begun to accept what the natives of the region kept telling him, that it was a shadow land, a forgotten place, a land between worlds, where people lived like ghosts in shadows and life was very cheap.

"You seem to see things I do not," Shan observed, uncertain whether it was anger or just a hard-edged alertness that had settled into Jakli's eyes. Even after she had agreed to take Shan to the place where Lau died, Fat Mao had argued against it, complaining that she had to return to the hat factory, that the place called Karachuk would be too dangerous for Shan. Fat Mao had returned them to the garage by then, where Akzu had been waiting, sharing a skin of kumiss with the surly mechanic. Akzu had pointed toward the high ranges and raised his voice. Finally, when Jakli had promised to return to the factory after delivering Shan to Karachuk, he had embraced his niece and knelt to pray facing west, toward the Muslim holy city.

"By rights, we should not be in the desert in a truck," she said after a moment. "Only with camels is it safe, and even then the inexperienced often die. But we have only a short distance, and this close to the mountains we can drive most of the way on the old river bed," she said as she guided the vehicle down a short bank of sand onto a wide, level channel of packed sand. "The key is to avoid the soft spots."

"If we don't?"

"The desert can swallow a truck as easily as a man or a camel." As if on cue a pile of white bleached bones appeared on the bank of the dead river. It contained a long skull and heavy ribs and was pointed in the direction of the snowcapped mountains. "It's always been this way, since the early Silk Road. Some people got wealthy from the passage. Some people just died."

After almost an hour Shan discerned a line of shadows on the horizon. Irregular and large, they seemed like misshaped buildings one moment, eroded rock formations the next. For a moment, from a distance, Shan believed that they were creatures bent under heavy loads.

At a curve in the riverbed Jakli accelerated and shot straight across the bank, directly toward the formations, then, half a mile away, turned ninety degrees to drive parallel to them toward the south. "The Silk Road," she said abruptly. "Do you know much of it?"

"The school texts," Shan said with a shrug.

His words brought a grimace to her face. "They will tell you it was a region of terrible class struggle, of great oppression, of temples for the worship of wealth built on the backs of slaves," she said, slowing the vehicle to steal a glance at the mysterious shapes. "Our history texts," she said, slowly shaking her head, "they are like studying beautiful paintings from the back of the canvas." She gestured toward the shapes. "The glorious Karachuk. Ignored by our teachers because it was not Chinese. But it is because of places like this that I have learned not to curse the Taklamakan. The very elements that make the desert so treacherous have preserved its treasures."

Jakli's expression grew lighter as she eased the truck toward a low, flat ridge. Following her gaze Shan saw an ancient wall. "Karachuk was an oasis on the southern arm of the Silk Road," she explained, "when the ice fields in the mountains still fed the river enough to keep it flowing all year. A major city once, praised for its fertility and hospitality in the ancient texts. Uighurs lived here, and Kazakhs and Tibetans. Life was so pleasant that many travelers lingered for months or years, even for the rest of their lives. The old writings spoke of it, but it was lost centuries ago in a grandfather sandstorm, a karaburan. Then ten years ago another storm came and the top of it was swept clean."

Shan could clearly see now that the shapes were the remains of man-made structures. A pressed earth wall the color of the sand rose in spots to a flat top and elsewhere had crumbled, revealing in its gaps small sand hummocks whose orderly placement suggested buildings. As Jakli crested the dune that extended south of the wall like a giant drift of snow, a huge form of distinctly human features greeted them. It was a statue of a reclining Buddha, twenty feet high at the shoulder, leaning on an elbow to face the southern mountains, toward Tibet. Most of its head was gone. Only the mouth, curved in a serene smile, remained above the neck.

"I had forgotten that the Buddhists were here," Shan said slowly. Buddhists. Perhaps he had begun to find a trail after all, a trail of hidden Buddhists. The Muslim boy who wore a rosary. The secret Tibetan classroom in Lau's cave. The waterkeeper in the rice camp. A headless Buddha in the desert.

"It was all Buddhist, for hundreds of miles north and east. Then Muslims came from the west and Chinese came from the east," Jakli explained. "I have read the journals of a traveler from the east," she continued after a moment. "Xuan Zang, his name was. He passed through the kingdom of Karachuk on a pilgrimage to India, as an envoy from your emperor. Twelve hundred years ago. The kingdom's census showed five thousand souls living here, in a luxury and peacefulness unknown in what was then China. Grapes hung from arbors above every doorway. Households had peach and pomegranate trees near the street, and the king ordered that a passerby had the right to pluck a ripe fruit for refreshment, but only one." Jakli looked in his direction with a wry smile. "Now that was enlightened communism."

She pointed toward the south, where the tops of the high ranges could be seen on the horizon. "But they owed everything to the ice fields in the mountains, which fed the rivers and irrigation channels that flowed here. Then the ice fields began to shrink. People began to move closer to the mountains as the water disappeared. By the time the sand storms came it was already mostly deserted. I remember when the the storm uncovered the city. People said it was the work of God, to remind us of who we are. Others said it was the work of the desert spirits, who were inviting us back."

There was one more dune, smaller, that ran diagonally along the southern end of the ruins, in front of a gap in the old walls near the Buddha. Jakli accelerated over the low mound. The front wheels of their vehicle left the sand, and with a heavy lurch they landed in the ghost city of Karachuk.

The ruins cast a spell over Shan the instant he climbed out of the truck. They were in a small courtyard surrounded by vague shapes of buildings constructed of baked mud bricks, their color and texture so much like the sand that the entire landscape was a patchwork of browns and grays. The twisted, desiccated remains of trees climbed out of the sand here and there. The top of an arch protruded from the desert thirty feet away.

Jakli began to walk toward an opening between the outer wall and the largest, most intact of the structures, a roofless rectangular building of stone blocks with high narrow window openings almost as high as the wall. A barracks perhaps, Shan thought. Short stumps as thick as his arm, baked rock-hard from the centuries of dry heat, poked out of the sand at regular intervals beside lower walls that might have been the ruins of personal dwellings. There once had been free peaches for the thirsty traveler.

As they passed the large stone structure Shan saw the remains of wood beams protruding in a row from the outer wall, supports for roofs long gone. At one of the ruins the walls remained high enough to hold the beams in their original position, giving an idea of how the street would have looked eight or nine centuries before. Shan cautiously stepped into the doorway. He started and leapt back at the sight of two large eyes staring at him. Jakli laughed, and he peered back inside to study the life-sized mural painted on the interior wall. Although cracked and disjointed where plaster had fallen away, he could plainly see the figure of a leopard feeding on a small brown animal. The colors had bleached away to mere tinted shadows, but the savage emotion of the cat's eyes seemed as vivid as the day when they had been painted centuries earlier.

As he backed away a sound came from nearby, the braying of an animal or perhaps just the wind playing with the ruins. After another hundred paces their path opened into a courtyard with several misshapen stone columns arranged in a circle. Jakli stopped and pointed at the columns. As he approached them he saw features in the wasted stone, a hand here, a graceful leg there. It had been a garden of statuary.

They climbed half a dozen stone steps from the ruined garden to the top of a small knoll, the highest point within the walls. The reclining Buddha dominated the scene behind them. The figure appeared so relaxed, so natural a part of the rolling landscape that it seemed at any moment the statue might stand and start walking toward the Kunlun. At the far end of the ruins, to the north, at least three hundred yards away, more ruined statuary stood in a line in the sand.

"Sentinels," Jakli explained as she pointed to them, "covering the northern approach. Stationed at the top of the city wall." She turned and gestured toward a shape closer to them, on the long, low dune that covered the western wall. The helmeted head of a warrior emerged from the sand. Beside it the top half of a hand protruded, held up as if in warning.

The sight brought an unexpected grin to Shan's face. He felt an odd peace in the presence of such ancient beauty and mystery. He had seen statues like these at other ruins in China and Tibet. But always before they had been pockmarked with bullets or scorched from explosives. The army had been fond of using such statues for target practice. Most ancient fortress walls had been brought down because they symbolized imperialism or could be used by rebels. The huge national libraries, some filled with manuscripts dating back over two thousand years, had been destroyed by the revolutionaries. Temples, not only in Tibet, had suffered the same fate. As a student Shan had been bused to one of the old imperial tombs to watch the Red Guard conduct a criminal trial for an ancient Ming emperor, disinterred from his tomb. The emperor had been convicted of a lengthy list of crimes against the people, and his body burned with the artifacts from the tomb.

But Karachuk had evaded the hand of Beijing by sleeping under the sands. Shan could have contemplated the scene for hours. He saw the same grin on Jakli's face and knew she felt it too. He realized that the things he enjoyed the most in life seemed to be those which had been forgotten, overlooked by modern Chinese society. The hidden monks of Tibet. The old Taoist texts taught by his father. The hand of an ancient warrior rising out of the sand.

They continued down the path, away from the wall, descending gradually toward a large bowl below a long, high outcropping of rock that defined the eastern boundary of the town. Shan paused to study the collection of buildings below the center of the outcropping, a dozen small structures which were in far better repair than the others. They were constructed of the same pressed earth and mud brick walls as the other structures, but their walls, though cracked, were still intact, and they had roofs, capped by grey, sun-baked tiles that had been covered with sand and pieces of rotten wood. Beyond the huts was a larger building consisting of a square end joined to a round domed structure, which also appeared to have survived the centuries without serious decay. Or perhaps, Shan considered, as he studied the structure, it and the smaller buildings had been artfully reconstructed to appear as ruins to the casual, or distant observer. Behind the domed building, in a corral consisting of three stone walls abutting the face of the outcropping, stood several long-haired horses of the short, sturdy breed that had once conveyed the soldiers of the khans across two continents. In front of the large structure Shan noticed a small ring of stone above which hung a tripod of weathered beams. A well.

Shan became aware of Jakli standing apart, gazing at him uncertainly. "I don't know what they will do. It's dangerous place, like Akzu said."

"But Lau died while visiting here?"

Jakli nodded.

"Meaning she had friends here. Like Wangtu said, people she trusted."

Jakli nodded again.

"If Lau had friends here, then I am not afraid," he said, hoping his voice did not betray his uncertainty.

She seemed about to answer when her head snapped up.

A man was walking away from the large building in an erratic, weaving motion toward the corral, as if drunk. They watched from the shadows as he quickly saddled one of the horses and trotted down a path that led through the north end of the ruins.

Jakli was still watching the man as Shan moved down the trail, past the huts to the plank door of the large building. The horses silently watched him. A faint scent of smoke hung in the air. He paused at the door, glancing at Jakli, who lingered on the hill, surveying the little village nervously, as if she had decided after all that it had indeed been a mistake to bring him here.