It was almost dusk before Shan was able to return to the boy's grave, having finally left Lokesh in Jakli's care. His friend seemed to have gone into a strange trance, staring at the jade bead for more than an hour, during which the wild-eyed woman had reappeared, with a quiet, morose air, and sat beside the old Tibetan. When Shan had left the tent, the woman was patting Lokesh on the back like a sick child, humming one of her cradle songs as Jakli tried to coax him into eating some buckwheat porridge.
The last rays of the sun washed the back of the clearing, causing the grave to glow with an eerie pink light. Inside the rock enclosure the air was deathly still. A solitary cricket chirped.
Shan moved slowly along the edge of the rocks, then dropped to his knees beside the small mound of earth. He placed his palms on top of the loose soil, then stroked it, realizing after a moment that he was repeating the motion of the crazed woman, rubbing it the way a parent would smooth the blanket of a sleeping child. He had a son somewhere, not seen in years. With a stab of pain he realized that he didn't know if his own son was still alive. The possibility of his son's death had never occurred to him. But the tides of insane violence that had surged through his country did not discriminate between young and old. Children died for the sins of their parents, sometimes quickly, sometimes by the slow extinction of being abandoned. No, that was history, a voice in his head argued, and Shan's son would have the protection of his mother, a high cadre in the Party. Then he looked back at the grave under his hands. Khitai no doubt had thought himself well protected with the Red Stone clan. Children still died.
Was that indeed why he was here? he wondered. Was there something historic in the death of the woman Lau, something sensed by the old lamas that signaled a new tide of destruction, that meant a new demon of repression had been unleashed?
He absently scooped some of the loose earth from the grave, then slowly sprinkled the soil back over the mound and patted it smooth again. What was it about this homeless Kazakh boy that made him suddenly so dangerous to Bajys that he had to be shot? Had he indeed tried to stop Bajys's betrayal of the clans and the secrets of Fat Mao? Had he stolen something? Was it punishment? A mischievious boy who wandered from camp to camp might learn things, might be tempted by things that in turn could tempt Bajys. But what? The meager possessions of impoverished nomads? And what could he have that Bajys did not also have? Both boys, he remembered. Alta and Khitai had played together and had then been killed two days apart. One beaten and shot, the other beaten and stabbed. Maybe the boys had known something, had discovered something so dangerous to their killer they could not be left alive. They lived in a land of secrets. Secret families. Secret dissidents. Secret army bases.
As he idly stroked the earth, his fingers brushed something hard. He probed the soil and retrieved a curved piece of wood, small enough to fit into his hand. It had been crudely carved into the image of a bird in flight. It could have been one of Khitai's toys. It could have been a religious symbol. He pushed his fingers into the sandy soil and dragged them along the length of the grave. Near the head of the mound they touched something else, a five-inch splinter of wood. It was the missing piece from the strange wooden letter, containing a single line of the Sanskrit-like text. What did it mean? Was it an epitaph? Could the killer read the strange text? Did it contain a message that had caused the boy's death? He laid the two objects, the splinter of text and the crude bird, before him. Had they been buried by the same person? Perhaps they were both just offerings, or mementos. Did they mean something when put together?
He stared at them a long time, then scooped out two small holes and reverently returned the bird and the splinter of wood to the grave.
The cricket chirped again. Crickets were supposed to bring good luck. But they had brought none to Khitai. And none to Red Stone clan.
He rose and paced about the darkening clearing, considering it not as a graveyard but as a killing place. Bajys could have come up from the encampment or climbed along the ridge, over the rocks, into the clearing. He had come near the end of day, the end of a day when Khitai had been playing with Alta, the boy with the dropka. He had shot, but no one had heard a gun.
He realized the wind that coursed over the rocks could mask such a sound. As he paused to listen to its low moan, Shan felt something black and icy surge within him. It came like this sometimes, a dark coldness welling within, and when it did he had to stop and fight it. Sometimes it came on him with a spell of shaking, other times as a burning spot on his arm where he wore his lao gai tattoo, or along his spine where the knobs had used cattle prods. It was black and shapeless, and he had no name for it. It wasn't fear, or hate, it was just the thing that lingered from his years in the gulag, especially from the first weeks when all he could remember was a miasma of pain and people shouting at him. He closed his eyes and remembered the first time he had met one of the lamas, when the old Tibetan had pulled Shan's face out of the mud as he lay beneath a raging guard, about to suffocate. The lama had straddled Shan's body to take the baton blows meant for Shan. He remembered the serene smile on the lama's face as the guard beat him, and his weakness passed. He put a hand against the rock wall for a moment to steady himself, then continued around the clearing.
As he walked he found a place in the wall opposite the entry path where a thick slab of rock had tumbled from above, creating a small sheltered alcove. He stepped into its shadows and struck a match. A white cylindrical object lay at the base of the rock, partially covered with sand. He reached for it and found that it was a candle, which he lit just as the match flickered out.
Protected as it was from the wind, the sandy floor of the little enclosure still showed shallow indentations where two people had sat, facing the flat rear wall. On the wall, inscribed in chalk, was a circle eighteen inches wide. Only a circle. It could be a drawing game played by children. Shan's mind drifted to other circles he had seen on walls, those drawn on prison walls to symbolize a mandala, which always began with a circle to focus the mind into awareness of inner space and emptiness. Some circles were drawn to help focus meditation. But that was in Tibet, not in a Kazakh herding camp.
He held the flame higher and saw more writing on the adjacent wall. Two horizontal lines intersected by two perpendicular lines, with two Xs and two Os in four of the boxes formed by the lines. A drawing game popular in the West, played by Shan with his father when Shan had been Khitai's age. He looked back at the circle. No doubt it too had been part of a game, perhaps simply a target for boys throwing stones. He turned to the line game. It had been interrupted. He shuddered as he saw in his mind the young boy playing his innocent game, only to be dragged away by someone intent on killing him. Did it mean Alta had been a witness, left sitting in the alcove? Or did it mean the murderer himself had been playing the game with Khitai? A murderer so heartless as to kill a child would be capable of anything, even luring a child to his death by an act of playfulness. What kind was it, Lokesh would have asked, what kind of demon had taken over Bajys? Hariti, the dropka had said. The child-eating demon.
As Shan descended the hill, Malik was sitting in the evening greyness at a small fire by the animal pens, the big mastiff laying beside him. He was studying the sky and seemed not to notice when Shan sat beside him.
The sky was still and vast, dominated by a brilliant half moon. From a distance an animal howled. On the far side of the fire Shan saw a large peg in the ground from which a rope extended into the darkness. Tethered to the rope were several young horses.
When he had been released from prison, he had spent many nights like this, under the stars in secret meditation places shown him by the old lamas. Sometimes one of them, usually Gendun, had sat with him, trying, he eventually realized, to draw out the torment that resided in his soul. They had reconstructed his life year by year, sometimes month by month, having him speak over an old ceramic urn decorated with a simple line drawing of the Compassionate Buddha.
"The pot is now full," Gendun had said when they had finished, and he had
capped the vessel with a ceramic lid. He had handed Shan a rock and one of the small, melodic bells used in the temple, then left Shan under the stars without further explanation.
Shan had been on an open ledge, so high that the sky had been almost as broad below him as above him. Once he had tried to move the urn and it had seemed incomprehensibly heavy. After several hours, in the darkest of the night, Shan had shattered the urn with the rock and picked up the bell. He had rung the small bell, making a sound like a brilliant vibrating crystal, until the sun rose.
He fingered the tiny shard of the urn that he still carried in his pocket. He had returned days later to retrieve it, for there was one piece of his prior life he could not leave behind. His son.
When Malik reached over to nudge his leg, the touch was so unexpected that Shan jumped. "Do you think he went there?" the boy asked quietly. "Last year, when a baby died, my uncle said they go to a beautiful valley on the moon."
Shan followed his gaze toward the moon. It made his heart ache, that the boy was so familiar with death. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe. It is very beautiful."
"It's so white," Malik whispered. "It must be the color of their sand." He was silent a moment, then asked another question. "Where would they get water?"
"Perhaps," Shan suggested, "they need no water."
The comment seemed to confuse the boy. He looked into the flames. "Water is life," he said, sounding very wise. "Is that how you know you're dead? You have no more thirst?" When Shan didn't answer he slowly bent and lifted something lying at his feet. A knife. And a thin piece of wood that widened into an oval at the end. He began slicing away slivers of the wood, aiming the cuttings into the embers where they curled in the heat, then flashed into a quick, hot flame.
"A spoon," Malik volunteered. "A present for Jakli and-" he paused. "A present, for the horse festival."
Shan watched him work the wood with firm expert strokes. "I saw the bird you gave him," he ventured quietly.
The boy showed no surprise. "My mother asked me to carve one when the baby died last year. To help guide him through the sky, she said. This time no one asked but-" Malik shrugged. "The zheli are younger than me. It made me sad, to know they had grown up always running. Khitai, he had no ashamai saddle, no sundet horse."
"I don't understand."
"Those orphans, they never have a real home. Khitai said when he was young people passed him around, to protect him. Sometimes he was in the mountains, sometimes in a city. Once he spent a year living in a cave. He said it was better with Bajys and Lau, but growing up like that, it meant he didn't know the old Kazakh ways. I was sorry he had no saddle." Malik paused and glanced at Shan. "When a boy is five years old he can ride alone," he explained, "and is given a special soft saddle, an ashamai saddle, decorated with feathers and red paint. Later, when a mullah pronounces him ready to start the road to manhood, there are ceremonies and a feast and he gets a sundet horse, his first horse. But Khitai never had any. Not a saddle, not a horse. He said it was all right, that he loved all the animals, and they taught him things. He climbed a tree to see baby birds once. He followed butterflies."
"Were you good friends?"
"We only knew each other a little while and only were together two or three times a week. Sometimes he helped me tie the zheli out at night," the boy said, and gestured toward the line of tethered horses. "He spent most of his time with Bajys, looking for sheep on the high slopes or in their spot above the camp."
"What did they do there?"
"Talked, mostly. I think Bajys wanted to tell Khitai all the things he could remember about their old clan, so the memories wouldn't die too."
"Why would they go away like that?"
"Clans have secrets. There are memories that can't be shared in front of strangers."
Shan leaned forward and pushed a stick into the fire. "You and Khitai, what did you do together?"
"We played when we could. Sometimes we would climb into the lamb pens and laugh because they would try to nurse on our fingers. Sometimes we would go on walks and pretend things."
"What kind of things?"
"You know. Shooting soldiers."
The words made Shan look back at the yurt where Jowa and Fat Mao still sat with the computer. "Does Fat Mao come here a lot?"
"Not often. He's a soldier too," Malik said, as if understanding why Shan asked. "A special kind. Lung ma," he whispered with awe in his voice.
"Lung ma?" It was an old term, from the ancient courts. It meant horse dragon, a mythical beast, part horse, part dragon, that protected the common people from injustice.
"Sure. Like your Tibetan soldier."
Like Jowa. The lung ma, Shan realized, was a counterpart to the purbas.
"They all call themselves Mao. Like a joke. You know this Mao, that Mao. Too dangerous for real names, he told me once. They make things happen to the government sometimes," Malik declared with a knowing nod.
"Did Khitai know about them?"
"No. It's a secret. Fat Mao made me promise. Says if I can keep the secret maybe someday I can be one too," the boy said, and it saddened Shan somehow. Did Lau know about the lung ma, he almost asked, then realized he didn't need to. Fat Mao had sent the message to the purbas about her death. If Lau had been part of the lung ma she may have been killed for it. The main job of boot squads was to stamp out resistance, and nowhere in China was there more violent resistance than in Xinjiang.
"Did you know Lau?" he asked.
"Sure. She brought medicine for the animals sometimes."
"Did you hear she was dead?"
"Only yesterday. It was a secret until then."
"Do you think she was killed for what she did for the orphans?"
Malik took a long time to answer. When he did, he looked toward the young horses. "She didn't do anything for them that I don't do for our zheli," he said, and there was an edge of fear in the boy's voice. He spoke several Turkic words to the horses, calming words that had the rhythm of a song, then suddenly turned to Shan with an expression of pain. "If they take us to the city, we won't know who we are. We won't have horses. We won't have tents, maybe not even dogs." He fell silent for a long moment. "And what will happen when I am old? There will be no more clan. No one to carve me a bird when I die."
Shan cradled the boy's hand in his own. "You are strong. A strong spirit will always find the way."
They sat in silence. How long had it been since he had talked with his son like this? Years. No, never like this. Shan's wife, the dutiful party cadre, had raised their son hundreds of miles from Shan and jealously guarded the boy when they were together. He had always told himself that it would be like this one day with his son, but that had been just one more of the lies that had kept him alive during his Beijing incarnation.
A shooting star blazed across the sky in the direction of the moon. Another child perhaps, going to the beautiful white valley.
"Were you with Khitai when he played his line game on the rock?"
"We played those games sometimes. He knew games I had never seen before. But not that last day. A late lamb had been born in a grove of trees two miles from here. It is my job to watch the babies, or they could die. I had to stay with the lamb all day. Then I could be sure it knew the scent of its mother and that it was strong enough for me to bring it back to the other lambs."
"Until that night?"
"When I returned at dusk I was going to go up to Khitai's spot, to look for him. But one of the young rams got caught in a vine and cut its leg. I had to put on salve. It was crying. I spoke to it. Khoshakhan, khoshakhan, you have to say to lambs. It's an old word, like a charm. It's how they know you love them," the boy said, with the voice of an old man. He sighed. "It was dark. I stayed up late, because it was then that I began telling them why we have to leave them soon. The Brigade will take good care of the sheep, I said. What else can I say? All the lambs and young goats would have grown up with me in the mountains. And now none of us will. I have to at least leave
them with hope." He looked at Shan with an empty expression and shook his head. "The next morning I asked my aunt where he was, and she said probably up in his place in the rocks."
"What was it like, when you found him?"
Malik looked at the moon. "It was still dawn. He was sitting in the shadows against the rock, near where he is buried. He seemed surprised."
"Surprised?"
"I couldn't look after the first instant. But when I first found him I thought he was looking behind me, in surprise, like someone was creeping up on us. I said, you look funny. And you have three eyes." Malik looked down to the embers. "But his eyes had no seeing. I called for Khitai and ran away."
As Shan repeated the boy's words in his mind the dog's head shot up. Shan looked in the direction of the dog's gaze to see Lokesh standing in the shadows, looking as frail as a stick figure. The Tibetan sat down beside the dog, which immediately laid its head on his leg.
"I don't understand," Shan said to the boy. "Why did you call for Khitai?"
Malik frowned and looked back toward the moon.
"Because this boy," Lokesh answered Shan in a trembling voice, "the boy in the grave, he is not Khitai."
Malik sighed, as though with great relief, and nodded.
Shan looked back and forth from the boy to the old man. For a moment he felt as though he was not in the middle of a murder investigation but in a teaching, as if he sat between two lamas who were asking him to explain impossible contradictions.
"I told Akzu it wasn't Khitai," Malik blurted out. "Those things in the tent, the dombra and the jade bead, they weren't Khitai's. It was the other boy of the zheli who had visited that day, whose name was Suwan. He just had Khitai's red cap on. Akzu wasn't certain. The boy's face was so bruised and swollen. Akzu didn't know Khitai well, he's been away many times these past weeks. He said Khitai was the name of the boy Lau had sent, that whichever boy it was, Bajys had killed him, that if Khitai had gone with the other clan to escape Bajys, then may God protect him. He said I should not tell this to others, because it would just add to the sorrow of my aunts. He said either way an orphan had died, that a good Kazakh boy had been buried, and that was the end of it. I was not to tell the secret."
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