Shan silently climbed down in the shadows and inched his way along the far side of their own truck, out of the strangers' view, until he reached the passenger door, where he ventured another look over the hood. What was it, he thought, what was so peculiar about these men? They were well dressed. They all wore the same trim brown clothing, except for the white-shirted man speaking with Jowa. They had no visible weapons, but three had large wrenches extending out of their pockets, and one held a ball-peen hammer. Two had heavy wooden sticks like truncheons hanging from their belts. Inside the cab of the truck he saw a figure in the passenger seat, the face lost in the night. A bright orange ember moved to and from the face. A plume of smoke rose from the window. Shan looked back at the man who watched the sky. The demon had been called away by lightning, the woman had said. Demons used lightning to speak with each other.
They needed a few more minutes to complete repairs, Shan heard the white-shirted man explain to Jowa. But no one seemed to be working on the engine. The man asked where Jowa was heading. North, was Jowa's reply, north to sell salt. The two men behind the speaker began to move away, distancing themselves from Jowa as though wary of his reach, then circling about, toward the Tibetans' truck.
"Can we help you?" Jowa asked loudly, watching the two men as they approached his open door.
"Nothing up north," the stranger in the white shirt observed in an accusing tone, still the only one of his company to speak. "Nothing but bandits."
Lokesh climbed out of the truck and stepped to Jowa's side. The man in the white shirt stared at him intently, surveying him from head to toe.
Shan realized he could be mistaken. Public Security didn't always wear uniforms. But Public Security carried submachine guns, not wrenches.
"You a bandit, old man?" the big-shouldered Han asked with a lightless grin. His deep voice echoed off the rockface. "Where you going, sneaking about like this in the middle of the night?"
"Salt," Lokesh replied in a dry, croaking voice, and Shan saw him do something he had often seen him do in prison. He began shaking his head, and then his arm, as if he could not control it, as if he suffered from a disease of the aged. "Good Tibetan salt. Going as far as it takes to sell our salt," Lokesh said. Still shaking, he stepped toward the man, who retreated a step as if scared of him. "You should buy it so we can turn around and go home. This old truck hurts my bones," Lokesh groaned. "I want to go home."
The Han walked a complete circle around Lokesh, studying him again, then gave a shallow laugh. "Takes papers to sell things, old man. Bet you don't have papers. That's why you travel at night."
Shan's mind raced. If the strangers were bandits, what did the Tibetans have of value that might appease them? An old pair of binoculars. A week's supply of food. Perhaps the truck itself, and its barrels of salt. He had a nightmarish vision of the strangers driving away with Gendun still in his barrel.
The two men continued to circle the truck, aiming hand lanterns into the cargo bay. The man in white glanced back at the cab of his truck, toward the glowing cigarette that hung in the shadow.
Suddenly Shan was in the beams of the two brilliant lanterns held behind him. He stood like a dumb animal trapped by the light and let himself be led, one man pulling each elbow, to the man in the white shirt.
The man circled Shan as he had Lokesh, then stood in front of him, disappointment obvious on his face. He leaned close to Shan's ear. "Don't turn your back on the damned locusts," he said in a low voice. "They'll hit you with a stone and call it an avalanche." Locusts. The term was an epithet used by the Chinese for Tibetans, for the sound they made when chanting their mantras. The man looked back with a broad smile, apparently pleased with his suggestion, then stood in front of the three men.
"Don't think we can let you go north tonight," he announced. The men who had pretended to work on the tire rose, as if the words were a cue.
Shan glanced at Jowa, whose body was tightening like a coiled spring.
Shan put his hands in his pockets and shuffled forward, standing in front of Jowa. "You'll have to," he said in a good-natured tone.
The man in the white shirt seemed amused by Shan's announcement. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. "Why so, comrade?" He turned his body sideways, as if to make sure Shan saw the men assembled behind him.
"Because the People's Liberation Army is chasing us," Shan said matter-of-factly.
The man's smile broadened. "The three of you and an antique truck," he said with a skeptical air.
"You know the army," Shan shot back. "Sometimes they just do it for practice."
As Shan returned the man's steady gaze his smile began to fade. He nodded at one of the men beside him, who bolted toward the truck, disappearing into the shadows by the passenger's door. He surveyed Shan, Lokesh, and Jowa once more, as if being sure he could remember their faces, then looked at the cab a moment and snapped his fingers.
His men leapt into action. In less than a minute the road was cleared.
"Be careful, comrades," the man warned in an icy voice. "Bandits are around every corner."
Jowa stepped toward the cab with a sideways motion, his eyes jumping from man to man. Shan pulled Lokesh back to the truck, and seconds later they were in the cab and driving away.
They drove up switchbacks over a high ridge for a quarter hour, then stopped just past the top to help Gendun out of his barrel. As Lokesh slid out of the cab, Jowa touched Shan's arm. "I don't know who they were," he said. "I thought soldiers at first."
Shan realized Jowa was asking him to explain. "We're close to India and the road to Pakistan. There are smugglers. Maybe they were waiting for a shipment." Jowa pulled out his map and climbed out to study it in the parking lights. Shan turned to look through the rear window. No one was in the cargo bay. He looked in the side mirror. In the moonlight he saw Lokesh, sitting alone on the ground. Shan jumped out and jogged to the back of the truck.
Lokesh was holding his beads near his chest, counting them quickly. Shan climbed into the cargo bay. The hiding barrels were empty. Gendun was gone.
Shan stood with his hands clenched on the side of the barrel they had hidden Gendun in, his heart pounding wildly. A small white square of cloth was tied to the board above Gendun's barrel. A khata, a prayer scarf. Shan untied it and stared at it in confusion.
"Where is he?" Shan called out in alarm and darted to Lokesh, shaking his shoulder.
Lokesh looked up to the sky, slowly surveying the stars, as if they might show sign of Gendun. "He is gone now," he observed in a tiny voice.
Shan ran up the road a hundred feet and called Gendun's name, twisting the khata around his fingers. The sound flushed a bird from its roost and it flew across the face of the moon. He turned and saw that Jowa was in the bay now, staring at the empty barrels. Shan jogged back and squatted at Lokesh's side. "Where is Rinpoche?" he repeated desperately. "Was he taken by those men?"
"Lokesh, you must understand-" Jowa called out from behind Shan, "he's our-" His voice drifted off as he looked at the dark horizon. The wind seemed to rise, a cold wind that hinted of snow.
"He could be lost," Shan said in a brittle tone. "He could have fallen out of the truck on the steep slopes."
"He must have been taken," Jowa declared. "The bastards in the red truck. And we just drove away."
"Sometimes," Lokesh said with a long sigh, "a lama just gets called away." His voice was calm, but his eyes were forlorn. He saw the khata in Shan's hand, its end fluttering in the wind, and reached for it. Shan let it go. The old Tibetan laid it on his thigh and stroked it with a small, grateful smile, as though he needed reassurance that the Gendun who had traveled with them had been the flesh and blood Gendun. Shan dropped to the ground beside Lokesh, but his heart felt too heavy to pray.
Gendun was with the strange men in the red truck, the ones who acted like Public Security, who could chew up and digest a man like Gendun in hours if they chose. At best, Gendun was alone in the wilderness of mountai
ns. Gendun, who had hardly known the outside world until seven days before. With a pang he remembered the first time he had met Gendun, hidden away in his hermitage. He had marveled over the watch on Shan's wrist. When Shan had let him examine it, he had listened to it, and shook his head, not just for the wonder of its workings but that people would think they needed such things. "You Chinese," he had said with a grin and a shake of his head.
Jowa turned the truck around and drove slowly in the direction they had come as Shan stood on the sideboard and held onto the mirror mount, calling out Gendun's name. Jowa turned on the headlights. They drove for a mile, then Jowa stopped and turned off the engine. Jowa sat at the wheel, gripping it tightly, torment twisting his face. Shan looked at him a moment. Did Jowa's pain come because he was a warrior who could find no enemy or because of what he had said before, that if the lamas didn't survive, there was no point in continuing?
"What if it just ends like this?" Jowa asked in a near whisper. "The last of the old ones just disappears. And the world stumbles on, a body without a soul." He looked out at a tall precipice that rose toward the heavens, a vast, darker shadow in a landscape of shadow. "What if he were the last one?" he asked the mountains, so low Shan barely heard.
"They said a lama was missing," Shan reminded Jowa. "Lau was killed and a lama was missing."
Jowa gave a small, stiff nod. "So your demon's appetite just gets bigger and bigger," he said in a hollow voice. "Three killings now, and two lamas gone."
They drove slowly back to Lokesh, who still prayed at the roadside. Jowa got out and sat with him in the moonlight, lighting a stick of incense as Shan climbed into the cargo bay.
"What is it?" the purba called out when he saw Shan emerge with the tattered canvas bag that carried his meager belongings.
"I will go back," Shan said. "I will go no further until I am sure he is safe."
"You can't," Jowa said.
"I have to." Shan squatted by Lokesh, who looked at him with pain in his eyes.
"You can't because they sent you," Jowa protested. "Because Gendun said you're needed in the north."
"That woman and the boys are dead," Shan said. "They are dead, and Gendun is not. Not yet."
Lokesh, his eyes now locked on the ember at the tip of the incense, slowly shook his head. "Those evil men were meant to be on the road tonight," he said. "And Gendun was meant to disappear tonight."
"And maybe I too was meant to disappear," Shan suggested.
"No," Lokesh said. "You are meant to go on." The certainty in his voice rang like a bell.
"Lokesh, my friend," Shan said, and he knelt now, putting his hand on Lokesh's shoulder. "I have been torn apart and patched back together so many times I am like a ragged old quilt. There are still so many pieces of me that don't fit together that sometimes I wonder my soul doesn't burst apart." He sensed the anguish in his voice, but he could not hide it.
"And you think Gendun has to put them together, Xiao Shan?" Lokesh asked.
"I don't know." He looked at Jowa, who stared at him, his face seeming to swirl with emotion. "But I know that of all the world I have seen, the lamas are the best part of it."
Shan stood, holding the straps of his bag, which still sat at his feet. He looked over the mountains, the snowcaps glowing in the moonlight. The wind blew steady and cold, reminding him that Gendun had nothing but his robe and a thin piece of canvas against the elements. An animal howled in the distance.
"We will wait here for Xiao Shan," Lokesh said to Jowa, as though Shan had already left, and raised the stick of incense in his hand as if it were a torch. "Xiao Shan will come back." He spoke as though Shan had already gone. "Because somewhere, on a high mountain, he will realize something. We are not responsible for Gendun. Gendun is responsible for us."
Shan realized that his fingers had closed around his gau, the box that carried his prayer and his feather. Gendun had sensed something that afternoon when he had given him the token, when he had emphasized to Shan that their trip could end in unexpected ways. Slowly, almost unconsciously, he sat down with his companions.
They prayed until the stick burned out, then they climbed back into the truck. Shan stood in the back, fiercely gripping one of the ribs of the bay, watching the blackened mountains as they moved on into the night.
***
He slept fitfully, often awakened with nightmarish visions of Gendun in peril, Gendun lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, Gendun in the hands of Public Security, interrogators standing by with electric cattle prods. He was roused when the truck made a sudden, wide turn onto a rough gravel track, then drifted off again, the eastern sky already grey with the hint of dawn.
It wasn't the morning light that broke the deep slumber that finally came, nor the stopping of the truck, but the braying of a large animal at the side of the vehicle, a sound so explosive that Shan sprang out of his sleep and slammed his head into one of the opposite barrels.
"End of the road," Jowa called out from behind the truck, where he stood with Shan's canvas bag. Shan stumbled to the open tailgate, holding his throbbing head, and nearly stumbled onto Lokesh as he stepped down. The old Tibetan was bent over at the rear of the truck, peering around the corner with a glint in his eye. He acknowledged Shan with an anxious nod and looked back around the truck.
As he surveyed the new landscape, Shan touched his forehead, absently noting that the fingers came away with a trace of blood. In the dim dawn light he could see that they were in what seemed to be a maze of huge boulders and outcroppings. Pockets of snow lay scattered among the rocks. No, not snow, he realized as he stared at one of the bright patches. It was sand.
He stepped around the truck and froze. Standing eight feet away was a tall brown creature with a long face and two large humps on its back, wearing a leather harness. A Bactrian camel. Lokesh ventured forward, shielding himself behind Shan as he peered over Shan's shoulder. The camel looked up at them, snorted, emitted another loud bray, then shook itself, creating an unexpected jingle. Small bells were fastened to the ends of the harness.
Lokesh burst into a low, wheezing laughter. Shan turned and stared in confusion at his old friend. The laughter could mean that Lokesh was scared, or confused, or even, on rare occasions, that he was filled with joy.
An angry syllable shot out from the shadows behind them. The camel seemed to recognize the voice or the word, and took two steps forward with an expectant look. Shan looked back for the source of the voice. He could see past the boulders more clearly now, into a gravel wash that descended slowly through the maze of outcroppings toward a series of smaller rocky ridges and long, low mountains covered with gravel and clumps of grey-green vegetation.
"Ai yi!" Lokesh exclaimed in a loud whisper, and stepped closer to Shan as though for protection. The smaller boulders were coming to life. The rising sun had given shape to several of the patches of darkness Shan had seen by the rocks. They were flesh, not stone, silent figures huddled under cloaks of gray and brown. They began to rise slowly, hesitantly, as if the sun's warmth had stirred them from hibernation. But as the faces drew up Shan could see they were not sluggish, only wary.
"Jowa!" one called, and stood up straight, throwing off his cloak. It was a Tibetan, a man several years younger than Jowa, wearing a strip of maroon cloth tied around his sleeve. It was a mark of defiance for monks broken by the government, a swath of color marking the robe that only those with a certificate from the Bureau of Religious Affairs were legally permitted to wear. The Tibetan looked from Jowa back toward a tall man in a fleece vest whose thick black hair was speckled with grey and partially covered with a brimless brown cap. Lingering in the shadows at the tall man's side was a third figure, thin as a post, a man with a stern face and restless eyes, who was wearing denim jeans and canvas running shoes. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken.
The young Tibetan sprang forward and embraced Jowa, who quickly turned and pointed over the mountaintops, toward the direction they had come. Jowa produced a st
ub of a pencil from his pocket and began marking on a crude map the youth pulled from his pocket. The youth nodded when Jowa was done and climbed into the driver's seat of the truck. A moment later the engine sputtered to life, and with a reluctant groan the old Jiefang edged forward, then gained speed as it maneuvered up the twisting track that led back over the mountains.
"He will watch for Gendun," Jowa said to Shan in a hollow tone. "If he sees Tibetans on the road, he will ask them to watch also."
As the truck disappeared, Shan fought a wave of emotion. The truck was his last connection to Gendun, the last link to the new life he had built in the high ranges of central Tibet, to the monks who had become the only real family he had known since the Red Guard had killed his father more than thirty years before. It was time for Shan to leave the mountains, one of the monks had told him that night at the mandala. Not forever, perhaps, but for a while, to gain distance. To understand who he was, the monk had meant. Shan wasn't a monk, though he lived with monks. But he also wasn't Chinese anymore, not a Beijing Chinese. Consider it a pilgrimage, another monk had said. But Buddhists were sent to the sacred peak of Mount Kalais or other holy sites where the spirits of deities resided. Shan's pilgrimage was to death and confusion, to places where perhaps only sorrow and distrust resided.
They had meant to honor him with their trust, he knew. But in that moment he felt no honor. He felt only fatigue and fear. Fear for Gendun. Fear for the boys who had been killed for reasons no one knew. Fear that he would be stopped before he fulfilled the trust. Imagine you are in a spirit palace, one of his Buddhist teachers had once said, with a hundred doors before you. Only one door is yours, but how long will it take to find it? He sensed the hundred doors today, and all but one led to failure. He fought the tempation to run for the truck, to catch it and climb back into his barrel.
The two strangers stepped forward, then froze at the sound of hooves rushing on the gravel slope below. A rider wearing a tattered felt coat and red wool cap appeared on a brown and white horse, dismounting in a fluid vaulting action before the horse had stopped. The rider stood silently in front of the front of the older man, offering a respectful nod, then pulled off the cap. It was a young woman, with black hair tied in two short braids behind her ears. The camel brayed, then bolted toward her, pushing past Shan and Lokesh so abruptly that Lokesh was knocked to the ground. The woman gave the camel a brief but affectionate stroke on its head, then trotted to Lokesh, extending a hand to help him to his feet.
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