The Skull Mantra is-1 Page 2

  Trinle nodded to one of the young monks sitting nearby, a man with one milky eye who instantly dropped his prayer beads and moved to the khampa's feet.

  "Break one of the warden's rules," the man explained, "and he sends you a clean shirt. You appear before him. If you are lucky, you are reduced. The immediate elimination of everything that provides comfort except the clothes on your back. The first night is spent outside, in the center of the assembly square. If it is winter you will leave your body that night."

  In Shan's three years he had seen six of them, carried away like altar statues, frozen in the lotus position, clutching their makeshift beads.

  "If it is not winter, the next day you may return to the shelter of your hut. The next your boots are returned. Then your coat. Next your food cup. Then the blanket, the pallet, and finally the bed."

  "You said that's the lucky. What about the others?"

  The young priest suppressed a shudder. "The warden sends them to Colonel Tan."

  "The famous Colonel Tan," the khampa muttered, then abruptly looked up. "Why a clean shirt?"

  "The warden is a fastidious man." The priest looked back to Trinle as though uncertain what more to say. "Sometimes those who go are sent to a new place."

  The khampa snorted as he recognized the hidden meaning of the priest's words, then warily circled Shan. "He's a spy. I can smell it."

  Trinle sighed and picked up the khampa's kit, moving it to the empty bunk by the door. "This one belonged to an old man from Shigatse. It was Shan who got him out."

  "I figured he took four."

  "No. Released. He was called Lokesh. He had been a tax collector in the Dalai Lama's government. Thirty-five years, then suddenly they call his name and open the gate."

  "You said this rice-eater got him out."

  "Shan wrote some words of power on a banner," Choje interjected with a slow nod.

  The khampa studied Shan with a gaping mouth. "So you're some kind of sorcerer?" The venom was still in his eyes. "Gonna work some magic on me too, shaman?"

  Shan did not look up. He watched Choje's hands now. The evening liturgy would soon begin.

  Trinle turned with a sad smile. "For a sorcerer," he sighed, "our Shan hauls rocks well."

  The khampa muttered under his breath, and threw his boot to the bunk by the door. He was conceding not for Shan, but for the priests. To be certain, he turned to Shan. "Fuck your mother," he grunted. When no one took any notice, a gleam entered his eyes. He moved to the bare planks of Shan's bunk, untied the string at his waist, and urinated on the boards.

  No one spoke.

  Choje slowly rose and began cleaning the bunk with his own blanket.

  The sheen of victory left the khampa's face. He cursed under his breath, then, nudging Choje aside, pulled off his shirt and finished the job.

  There had been another khampa in their hut two years earlier, a tiny, middle-aged herder jailed for failing to register with one of the agricultural cooperatives. Alone for nearly fifteen years after a patrol picked up his family, he had finally wandered into a valley town after his dog died. He had been the closest thing to a caged animal Shan had ever seen, always pacing back and forth in the hut like a bear behind bars. When looking at Shan his face had been like a small fist clenched in fury.

  But the little khampa had loved Choje like a father. When one of the officers, known as Lieutenant Stick for his affinity for the baton, had taken his stick to Choje for spilling a barrow load, the khampa had leapt on the Stick's back, pounding him, screaming profanity. The Stick had laughed and pretended not to notice. A week later, released from the stable with a limp from something they did to his knee, the khampa had ripped strips from his blanket and begun sewing pockets to the inside of his shirt. Trinle and others had told him that even if he stored up enough food in his new pockets for a flight across the mountains, it was futile to consider escape.

  One morning, when he had finished his pockets, he asked Choje for a special blessing. At their mountain worksite he began filling the pockets with rocks. He kept working, singing an old herder's song, until Lieutenant Stick moved near the edge of the cliff. Then, without a second's hesitation, the khampa had charged, hurling himself at the Stick, locking his arms and legs around the officer, using the extra weight to convey them both over the cliff.

  Suddenly the night bell rang. The single naked bulb that lit the room was extinguished. No talking was permitted now. Slowly, like a chorus of crickets claiming the night, the liquid rattle of rosaries filled the hut.

  One of the young monks stealthfully moved to keep watch by the door. From a hiding place under a loose board Trinle produced two candles and lit them, placing them at either end of the rectangle of chalk. A third was placed in front of Choje. The flame was too dim even to reach the kenpo's face. His hands appeared in the light, and began the evening teaching. It was a prison ritual, with no words and no music, one of the many that had evolved since Buddhist monks began filling Chinese prisons four decades earlier.

  First came the offerings to the invisible altar. Choje's palms were pressed together facing outward, his index fingers curled under his thumbs. It was the sign for argham, water for the face. Many of the mudra, the hand symbols used to focus inner power, still eluded Shan, but Trinle had taught him the offering signs. The bottom two fingers of Choje's disembodied hands withdrew into the palms and the hands aimed downward. Padyam. Water for the feet. Slowly, gracefully, Choje deftly moved his hands to offer incense, perfume, and food. Finally he closed his fists together, the thumbs extended upward like wicks from a bowl of butter. It was aloke. Lamps.

  From outside a long moan of pain punctuated the silence. A monk in the next hut was dying of some internal ailment.

  Choje's hands gestured toward the invisible circle of worshipers, asking what they brought for the glory of the inner deity. A pair of thumbless hands appeared in the light, the index finger of each hand touching at the tip, the other fingers folded. A tiny murmur of approval moved through the room. It was the golden fish, an offering for good fortune. New hands appeared, each after sufficient time to silently recite the dedication prayer that accompanied the prior offering. The conch shell, the treasure flask, the coiled knot, the lotus flower. It was Shan's turn. He hesitated, then extended his left index finger upward and covered it with his right hand flattened. The white umbrella, another prayer for good fortune.

  The room filled with the tiny, remarkable sound, as if of rustling feathers, that had become a fixture of Shan's nights, the sound of a dozen men silently mouthing mantras. Choje's hands returned to the circle of light for the sermon. He began with a gesture Shan had not often seen, the right hand raised with palm and fingers pointing up. The mudra of dispelling fear. It cast an uneasy silence on the room. One of the young monks audibly sucked in his stomach, as though suddenly aware that something profound was happening. Then the hands shifted, clasping together with the middle fingers pointing upward. The diamond of the mind mudra, invoking cleansing and clarity of purpose. This was the sermon. The hands did not change. They floated, unmoving, as though carved of pale granite, while the devotees contemplated them. The message could not have been more intensely communicated if Choje had shouted it from a mountaintop. The pain was irrelevant, the hands said. The rocks, the blisters, the broken bones were inconsequential. Remember your purpose. Honor your inner god.

  It wasn't clarity that Shan lacked. Choje had taught him how to focus like no teacher before. Through the long winter days when the warden kept them in- not for fear of losing prisoners, but for fear of losing guards- Choje had helped him reach an extraordinary discovery. To be an investigator, the only job Shan had ever known before the gulag, one had to have a troubled soul. The exceptional investigator could have no faith. Everything was suspect, everything transitory, moving from allegation to fact to cause to effect to new mystery. There could be no peace, for peace only came with faith. No, it wasn't clarity he lacked. In moments like this, with dark premonition weighing hea
vy, with his prior life pulling him like a man tangled in an anchor line, what he lacked was an inner god.

  He saw there was something on the floor below Choje's hands. The bloody rock. With a start, Shan realized that he and Choje were thinking about the same thing. The kenpo was reminding his priests of their duty. Shan's tongue went dry. He wanted to blurt out a protest, to beg them not to put themselves at risk over a dead foreigner, but the mudra silenced him like a spell.

  He clamped his eyes shut but still Shan could not focus on Choje's message. He kept seeing something else each time he tried to concentrate. He kept seeing the gold cigarette lighter hanging five hundred feet above the valley floor. And the dead American who had beckoned to him in his daylight nightmare.

  Suddenly a low whistle came from the door. The candles were extinguished, and a moment later the ceiling light switched on. A guard slammed open the door and moved to the center of the room, a pick handle cradled in his arm. Behind him came Lieutenant Chang. With mock solemnity Chang extended a piece of clothing so that no prisoner could mistake it. It was a clean shirt. He jabbed it toward several men as though feinting with a blade, laughing as he did so. Then he abruptly flung it at Shan, who lay on the floor.

  "Tomorrow morning," he snapped, and marched out.

  ***

  A sharp, chill wind slapped Shan's face as Sergeant Feng escorted him through the wire the next morning. The winds were harsh to the 404th, which sat at the base of the northernmost ridge of the Dragon Claws, a vast rock wall rising nearly vertically behind it. Updrafts sometimes ripped roofs from huts. Downdrafts sometimes pelted them with gravel.

  "Already reduced," Sergeant Feng muttered as he locked the gate behind them. "Nobody already reduced ever got the shirt." He was a short, thick, bull of a man, with a heavy stomach and equally heavy shoulders, his skin as leathery as that of the prisoners from years of standing guard in sun and wind and snow. "Everyone's waiting. Making bets," Feng added with a dry croak Shan took to be a laugh.

  Shan tried to will himself not to listen, not to think of the stable, not to remember Zhong's white-hot fury.

  Zhong's temper was in control for once. But the warden's gloating smile as he paced around Shan scared him more than the expected tantrum. He gripped his upper right arm, which often twitched in Zhong's presence. Once they had connected battery wires there.

  "If he had bothered to consult with me," Zhong said in the flat nasal tone of Fujian province, "I would have warned him. Now he will have to find out for himself what a damned troublemaker you are." Zhong lifted a piece of paper from his desk and read it, shaking his head in disbelief. "Parasite," he hissed, then paused and scribbled on the paper to record the insight.

  "It won't be for long," he said, looking up expectantly. "One wrong step and you'll be breaking rocks with your bare hands. Until you die."

  "I constantly endeavor to fulfill the trust the people have bestowed in me," Shan said without blinking.

  The words seemed to please the warden. A perverse gleam rose on his face. "Tan's going to eat you alive."

  ***

  Sergeant Feng had an unfamiliar look, an almost festive air about him. A drive into Lhadrung, the ancient market town that served as county seat, was a rare treat for the 404th guards. He joked about the old women and goats who ran from the side of the road, spooked by the truck. He peeled an apple and shared it with the driver, ignoring Shan, who was wedged between the two men. With a spiteful grin, he repeatedly moved the key for Shan's manacles from one pocket to the next.

  "They say the chairman himself sent you here," the sergeant finally said as the low, flat buildings of the town came into view.

  Shan didn't reply. He bent in his seat trying to roll up his cuffs. Someone had produced a pair of worn, oversized gray trousers for him to wear, and a threadbare soldier's jacket. They had made him change clothes in the middle of the office. Everyone had stopped his work to watch.

  "I mean, why else would they put you in with them?"

  Shan straightened. "I'm not the only Chinese."

  Feng grunted as though amused. "Sure. Model citizens, every one. Jilin, he killed ten women. Public Security would have put a bullet in him except his uncle was a party secretary. That one from Squad Six, he stole the safety gear from an oil rig in the ocean. To sell in the black market. Storm came and fifty men died. Letting him have a bullet was too easy on him. Special cases, you from home."

  "Every prisoner is a special case."

  Feng grunted again. "People like you, Shan, they just keep for practice." He stuffed two slices of apple into his mouth. Momo gyakpa, he was called behind his back, fat dumpling, for the curve of his belly and the way he was always scavenging food.

  Shan turned away. He looked over the expanse of heather and hills rolling like a sea toward the high ice-clad ranges. It offered the illusion of escape. Escape was always an illusion for those who had no place to escape to.

  Sparrows flitted among the heather. There were no birds at the 404th. Not all the prisoners were fastidious in respecting life. They claimed every crumb, every seed, nearly every insect. The year before there had been a fight over a partridge that was blown into the compound. The bird had narrowly escaped, leaving two men with a handful of feathers each. They had eaten the feathers.

  The four-story building that housed the government of Lhadrung County had a crumbling synthetic marble facade and filthy windows in corroded frames that rattled in the wind. Feng pushed Shan up the stairs to the top floor, where a small gray-haired woman led them to a waiting room with one large window and a door at each end. She scrutinized Shan with a twist of her head, like a curious bird, then barked at Feng, who shrank, then sullenly removed the manacles from Shan's wrists and retreated into the hallway.

  "A few minutes," she announced, nodding at the far door. "I could bring you tea."

  Shan looked at her dumbfounded, knowing he should tell her of her mistake. He had not had tea, real green tea, for three years. His mouth opened but no sound came out. The woman smiled and disappeared behind the near door.

  Suddenly he was alone. The unexpected solitude, however brief, overwhelmed him. The imprisoned thief suddenly left alone in a treasure vault. For solitude had been his real crime during his years in Beijing, the one for which no one had ever thought to prosecute him. Fifteen years of postings away from his wife, his private apartment in the married quarters, his long solitary walks through the parks, the meditation cells at his hidden temple, even his irregular work hours had given him a hoard of privacy unknown to a billion of his countrymen. He had never understood his addiction until that wealth had been wrenched away by the Public Security Bureau three years before. It hadn't been the loss of freedom that hurt most, but the loss of privacy.

  Once in a tamzing session at the 404th he had confessed his addiction. If he had not rejected the socialist bond, they said, there would have been someone there to stop him. It wasn't friends that mattered. A good socialist had few friends, but many watchers. After the session he had stayed behind in the hut, missing a meal just to be alone. Discovering him there, Warden Zhong had dispatched him to the stable, where they broke something small in his foot, then forced him back to work before it could heal.

  He examined the room. A huge plant extending to the ceiling occupied one corner. It was dead. There was a small table, polished brightly, with a lace doily on top. The doily caught him by surprise. He stood before it with a sudden aching in his heart, then pulled himself away to the window.

  The top floor gave a view over most of the northern quarter of the valley, bound on the east by the Dragon Claws, the two huge symmetrical mountains from which ridges splayed out to the east, north, and south. The dragon had perched there and taken phantom form, people said, its feet turned to stone as a reminder that it still watched over the valley. What was it someone had shouted when the American's body was found? The dragon had eaten.

  He pieced together the geography until at last, across an expanse of several mile
s of windblown gravel and stunted vegetation he discerned the low roofs of Jade Spring Camp, the county's primary military installation. Just above it, and below the northernmost Claw, was the low hill that separated Jade Spring from the wire-enclosed compound of the 404th.

  Almost without thinking Shan traced the roads, his work of the past three years. Tibet had two kinds of roads. The iron roads always came first. The 404th had laid the bed for the wide strip of macadam that ran from Lhasa, beyond the western hills, into Jade Spring Camp. Iron roads were not railways, of which Tibet had none. They were for tanks and trucks and fieldguns, the iron of the People's Liberation Army.

  The thin line of brown that Shan traced from an intersection north of town toward the Claws was not such a road. It was far worse. The road the 404th was building now was for colonists who would settle in the high valleys beyond the mountains. The ultimate weapon wielded by Beijing had always been population. As in the western province of Xinjiang, the home of millions of Moslems belonging to central Asian cultures, Beijing was turning the native population of Tibet into a minority in their own lands. Half of Tibet had been annexed to neighboring Chinese provinces. Population centers in the rest of Tibet had been flooded with immigrants. Endless truck convoys over thirty years had turned Lhasa into a Han Chinese city. The roads built for such convoys were called avichi trails at the 404th, for the eighth level of hell, the hell reserved for those who would destroy Buddhism.

  A buzzer sounded. Shan turned to find the birdlike woman standing with a cup of tea. She extended the cup, then scurried through the far door, disappearing into a darkened room.

  He gulped down half the cup, ignoring the pain as it scalded his throat. The woman would realize her mistake and take it back. He wanted to remember the sensation, to relive the taste in his bunk that night. Even as he did so he felt demeaned, and angry at himself. It was a prisoner's game that Choje warned against, stealing bits of the world to worship back in the hut.