Jakli sat with Jowa near a small smoldering brazier. The Uighur and the two Kazakh men were kneeling behind them, a sheen of excitement on their faces, looking at a small portable computer in Jowa's lap.
Jakli looked up, startled. "By the stable. There is a pallet for you in the tent with Lokesh."
But Shan stepped closer. One of the Kazakhs muttered a curse as he approached. Jowa seemed undisturbed. He glanced at Shan and kept working, tapping the keyboard, reading the screen with intense curiosity.
Jakli stood, uncertainty on her face. "It's only some records about agricultural production units. Jowa is helping with the computer."
Shan stepped to Jowa's side and studied the screen as the purba slowly scrolled through a computer file. The data was in Chinese, with the same heading on each screen, "Agricultural Production Inventories, Yoktian County." There were subheadings for cotton, wool, barley, and wheat, each with production records. Over seventy percent of the production was credited to the People's Construction and Development Corporation. Other, smaller entries, were for the patchwork of collectives and family enterprises comprising the remaining participants in the local industry.
Jowa stopped at the screen for wool production. One of the Kazakh men hovering over his shoulder pointed to an entry at the bottom of the screen. "Red Stone," it read. "That's us," the man said. "Red Stone Herding Enterprise. The clan enterprise."
Jowa highlighted the name and tapped a button. A five-year record of production from Red Stone appeared, with a graph at the bottom. The clan's wool production had steadily declined. Jowa tapped another button, producing a screen for five-year comparisons with others in Yoktian County. Red Stone had the lowest productivity in every year and by far the lowest cumulative total.
Jakli leaned over Jowa and translated what the screen said. While most of those present clearly understood Chinese, few, apparently, could read it. When she had finished, one of the Kazakh men spat a curse. "The Brigade," he said. "They beat us down for years, treat us like slaves in our own land, and still they are not satisfied."
"The People's Brigade, they call it," Jakli explained to Shan. "It was Beijing's first stage of settlement. Many of the soldiers sent here as occupation troops were given economic incentives to stay and develop the land. A company was formed for them and land grants made to the company. They took prime pastures and plowed them under for cotton and other crops. They became bigger and bigger. Now the Brigade is practically as powerful as the government. Runs schools. Runs local clinics. Even operates some of the prisons, on contract to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. Thousands of workers. Hundreds of enterprises. We could never compete."
"The Brigade and the army, they are the same?" Shan asked. China's military had a long tradition of investing in commercial companies.
"Five years ago the Brigade was privatized," Jakli explained. "But it's still run like the army. Run by Han Chinese who used to be generals."
"Like a kingdom," someone said in a bitter tone from behind them. Akzu had entered the tent. "A separate kingdom within the country, supported by Beijing."
"But what are you-" Shan began.
"They say production must be more efficient," Akzu said bitterly. "They say small clans are no longer cost effective."
"Cost effective?"
"The Poverty Eradication Scheme, they call it," Jakli said. "A government policy, implemented by the Brigade."
"But what does it have to do with your clan?"
Jowa interrupted by closing the screen with a loud snap. "The smallest producers are being bought out," he explained. "The Brigade is identifying the least efficient producers and will integrate those workers into more efficient production. Higher value added, they call it."
"You mean the clan is getting new lands?"
"No," Akzu said. "Our clan runs its business through a company with shares, something the government established several years ago. Now the Brigade is buying all the shares."
"But if you didn't agree to it-" Jowa began.
"There's a term I heard in the town," Jakli interjected. "A hostile takeover. Everyone kept repeating it, like they thought it was funny, like something you read about in American magazines."
"But just having its shares bought shouldn't affect the clan," Shan suggested.
Jakli grimaced. "To them, we aren't a clan, just new employees. The Brigade already has plans for Red Stone. Everyone will be assigned to towns, different towns, to break up the clan. Apartments will be given to parents with a child. Others will live in workers' dormitories." As she spoke a shudder seemed to move through her. She clutched her chest as though short of breath.
The headman pulled a folded envelope from inside his coat as he sat by his sons. "We received a letter last week. We are to deliver our herds, our horses, our dogs, even our tents to the Brigade by the end of the month. In ten days, just after our autumn horse festival, our nadam. All members report for reassignment." He gestured toward a stack of papers by the computer. "Final inventory of assets required. Every sheep, every lamb, every damned spoon and pot."
"Poverty Eradication Scheme," Jowa said in a hollow tone. "The bastards are liquidating the clan."
In the heavy silence that descended over the tent, nothing could be heard but the breath of the horses tethered outside.
"No one's said it like that before," Akzu said.
Fat Mao stood. "But it's the truth. This Tibetan speaks the truth. They've done it to Uighur farms. They've done it to Kazakhs in the north." His eyes narrowed and he looked at Shan. "Poverty Eradication Scheme." He spat the words and grimaced. "It's not about economics. It's about politics. People in Beijing planned it all. They want to make it impossible for a Uighur to be a Uighur, or a Kazakh to be a Kazakh." The man's eyes drifted toward Jowa. "The Chinese are very clever. They study a people and determine what is most important of all to that people, then they find a means to hollow that thing out, to first take away its power, then eventually remove it completely. In Tibet they take your holy men. Tell me, friend, without your holy men can a Tibetan be a Tibetan?"
Jowa looked away, then his eyes met Shan's. They had already lost their holy man. Jowa's hands closed tightly around the corners of the computer screen. "I grew up in the grasslands, with the herds," he said suddenly. Everyone stopped and looked at him, surprised by the sudden anguish in his voice. "It was like that in the valley where my family lived. They came in big trucks one day. They loaded everyone in two trucks, about fifty of us. Said that because our family owned land we were reactionaries. Said that the land needed Chinese technology, that they were going to bring tractors and plant Chinese wheat. They sorted through everything in the camp as we watched. Anything that was used for taking care of the herds or moving camp, even the carpets used in my family for eight generations, they put inside the main tent. They collapsed all the other tents and threw them on the big one. Then they set it on fire.
"My mother screamed. A soldier hit her with the butt of his rifle and knocked out four teeth. My sister ran to embrace her pony so they shot the pony. My father said a mantra to the compassionate Buddha and they grabbed his rosary, a coral rosary from the time of the Seventh Dalai Lama, and cut it so the beads were lost in the grass. My aunt jumped on the back of a soldier, screaming, scratching at his face." Jowa's voice drifted off.
"If your enemy leaves you only your hands," Akzu observed with a chill in his voice, "then you scratch them with your hands. If they take your hands and only leave your teeth, then you bite them." The words had the tone of an old war song.
Jowa nodded slowly. "But some soldiers took her out in a pasture." The anguish was back in his voice. "They did things to her, and then she died. They threw her body in the fire and then they drove us away. In the trucks they sang songs in praise of the Chairman. They hit us with rifles until we sang too."
"It's not so bad now," one of the Kazakhs said, but his voice lacked confidence. "Not so violent."
Jowa gave an angry snort. "Now they d
o it with computers and bureaucrats. And corporations." He turned to Akzu. "You think they'll send all of you to one place, mothers and fathers with their children? It didn't happen that way in Tibet. The families would arrive at a new apartment and the next day a Chinese comes for your child. Has to go to a special school, they say. A boarding school, far away. They learn to sing out of a little red book. And when they come back they all have Chinese names and mock all your old ways."
Akzu looked like he had been kicked in the belly. He held his hand tightly over his abdomen and slowly rose, as if with great effort. Without looking back, he walked out of the tent.
"Until last night," Shan said in the silence that followed, "we had a holy man with us. Then he disappeared."
Jakli sighed heavily. Fat Mao seemed to visibly stiffen. "Who took him?" he demanded.
But Shan could not reply. Just saying the words had filled him with fear again. He felt a desperate compulsion to run, to return to the mountains and find Gendun. The lamas hadn't understood, had expected too much of him. He didn't know the Muslims. He didn't know Xinjiang. He could do nothing about these Kazakhs who were being killed. Someone had been mistaken. None of this was about Tibetans.
Jowa quietly explained what had happened the night before.
"Uniforms?" Fat Mao asked.
"None."
"What color was the truck?"
Jowa looked at Shan. "Hong," the purba said. Red.
The Uighur and Jakli exchanged a glance of alarm. Fat Mao spat a curse.
Jakli looked at Shan. "The Brigade," she said slowly. "They drive red trucks." She looked back at the Uighur with question in her eyes. "But they can't be in Tibet. They're not authorized." She grimaced, as if realizing as she spoke that formal authority was unimportant to the Brigade. "I mean, they've never been there before."
Shan found his voice again. "If they took him," he said urgently, "if the red truck drove Gendun Rinpoche back to Xinjiang, where would they go? Where would they hold him?"
The Uighur slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, from which he produced a computer disc. "On to Glory," he said with a sour smile.
As Shan watched in confusion, Jowa accepted the disc and inserted it into the machine. When the screen lit again, it was dominated by huge Chinese characters that had once been part of Shan's daily existence as an investigator in Beijing. Nei Lou, it said. Classified. Internal government use only. A fire seemed to grow in Jowa's eyes as he stared at the screen.
The Uighur leaned forward and tapped the keyboard several times.
"Glory to the People Reeducation Facility," Jowa read out loud as the screen changed. "Lao jiao Camp 947." Lao jiao facilities were reeducation camps, jails for lesser offenders than those sent to the gulag, used to punish minor political sins. Admission to lao jiao was administrative, meaning that citizens could be sentenced on the authority of a single official, without a judge, without a trial.
"The Jade Bitch," Fat Mao said in a low voice.
Shan looked up at him.
"The prosecutor in Yoktian. Xu Li," the Uighur explained. "As cold and hard as jade. Glory Camp is her personal dungeon. Pass gas near her and off you go to eat rice for a few months in Glory Camp."
"Recent admission records," Jowa read off the screen. "But it's too soon," he said. "The disc is-"
"Up to date as of six o'clock last night," Fat Mao announced in a conspiratorial tone.
"Gendun was only taken last night."
"Keep looking," the Uighur said, nodding toward the screen.
"Unassigned numbers," Jowa read in a puzzled tone.
"Right. She always has a few numbers assigned to the others authorized to use the camp. The knobs. The army. The Brigade security teams. Her obsession with efficiency. Open prisoner registration files without names, based on anticipated arrests. They order food, arrange bedding, and staff assignments based on all the files. The Brigade can just take someone there and fill in the name at the gate. Sometimes she lists the reasons in advance. Youth gangs. Cultural recividists."
"A few files?" Jowa asked. "Thirty or forty you mean."
The Uighur bent over the screen in alarm. "Ta ma de!" he spat. "Damn it! What is she up to?"
They scrolled back and forth between recent admissions and the open files. After several minutes Fat Mao stood up with anger in his eyes. "Usually, Glory gets maybe five, six new inmates each week. A week ago she established forty open files. Gave ten to the Brigade to fill, ten to the knobs. Kept twenty for herself. Three days later half of the files are filled. Twenty new inmates. Yesterday six more, then-" He stopped in midsentence and pointed halfway down the screen. "And there's something new," he said. "Six more open files created yesterday. Assigned to the Public Security Bureau."
"But you said the knobs already get-" Jakli interjected.
"No. The local knobs, I meant," Fat Mao said in a low voice, like a growl. "This is different. This says Public Security Headquarters. Boot squads. Working for the bastard kings in a bastard government."
The words cast a pall over the company. They stared at the screen without speaking.
"Nothing about monks," Jowa said finally in a low aside to Shan. "Nothing about Gendun or Tibetans."
"Headquarters," Jakli repeated the words. "It could mean regional headquarters in Urumqi," she said, referring to the capital city of Xinjiang, six hundred miles to the northeast. "Or it could mean Beijing." She looked about, wide-eyed, as if she had seen a phantom. In either case it meant someone else was watching Yoktian County, from high above. Jakli moved as though to rise but seemed to have lost her strength. She sat back heavily and stared at the screen.
Shan stood suddenly. He felt short of breath. He stepped outside and breathed in the cool air. It had been Public Security headquarters in Beijing that had sent him to the gulag. He had assumed that the very worst that could happen to Gendun would be capture by the local knobs. But the headquarters knobs had university degrees and high ranks in the Party. The boot squads were their special soldiers, always led by a political officer. They would see Gendun differently. He would be an experiment. They might seek to use him, after breaking him with technologies not even the most serene mind could resist. They had done it before, more than once. They had even taken the Panchen Lama, the highest of all reincarnate lamas after the Dalai Lama, and imprisoned him for ten years in a maximum security prison near Beijing after he had spoken out for Tibetan independence. He had emerged a different man, married to a Han Chinese woman.
Inside the tent by the stables Shan found Malik kneeling by his bag, smoothing out a pallet consisting of three small carpets stacked together. Lokesh was sitting cross-legged on a similar pallet facing an assortment of objects that lay on a small red carpet, a Muslim prayer rug. He was holding the stub of a wooden pencil in his palm, in front of his chest, his eyes closed.
Shan's foot brushed against a tin can containing small bits of glass that lay at the edge of the red carpet. It tipped over, making a tinkling sound that snapped Lokesh out of his trance.
"He didn't have much," the old Tibetan sighed, gesturing toward the objects before him.
"These were the boy's?"
Lokesh nodded and stared inquisitively at the objects. The tin can with glass baubles. Three pencil stubs. A small, lute-like instrument with only two strings. A braid of leather straps that showed signs of having been repeatedly braided and unbraided, as if in practice. A single jade ball, the size of a large marble. Five pieces of dry, brittle wood with black marks that could have been writing on them. A young boy's treasures.
Malik raised the lute and plucked a string absently. "A dombra," he said sadly, "for singing the old clan songs."
Shan knelt and lifted one of the pieces of wood.
"We found them, that day," Malik said, looking at the pieces with a puzzled expression. "It had been smashed, the pieces scattered around his body."
What had been smashed, Shan almost asked, but he began fitting the pieces together and soon
saw that the object was composed of two pieces, a flat bottom frame into which a wedge slid. The top of the wedge held two lines of text written in small fluid characters that resembled Sanskrit, the nearly extinct language of the lands south of Tibet. When it slid open, the flat surface inside, complete except for a large splinter missing from the center, was filled with writing in the same script. Like a letter, he thought, with the address on top.
He looked up to see Lokesh staring intensely at the collection of objects. Like an investigator, Shan thought. No, not exactly, he realized as he watched Lokesh slowly extend his hand and brush his fingertips over each item, for the old Buddhist would never see the collection as physical objects, as the meager trail of a young life. He would see them as the vestiges of a young soul, as signals for the boy's spirit, the tracks of the boy's inner god. Lokesh seemed to no longer be aware of Shan, as if once again the unpredictable embers within had ignited. The old Tibetan stared at the jade ball and slowly leaned toward it, as if it beckoned him. Shan picked it up and extended it toward Lokesh. They were in the land of jade. China had always obtained its jade from the Turkistan kingdoms north of the Kunlun. The Jade Bitch, the Uighur had called the prosecutor. Shan saw that the jade was delicately carved with tiny lotus flowers, with a hole running through its center. A bead. He dropped it into the Tibetan's open palm.
"What is it, old friend," Shan asked. "Who was the boy? Did you know Khitai?"
Lokesh sighed. "Not this boy," he said, as if there were multiple Khitais, then stared at the bead as a single tear rolled down his cheek.
***
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