Clear Water Camp was one of the new relocation facilities, Lokesh had reported after he had encountered some of its residents digging for roots to eat. The government abhorred the nomads of the changtang, the high wilderness prairie that comprised much of central Tibet, for out in the vastness of the grasslands they were almost impossible to locate and even more difficult to control. They were, according to government fact-finding missions, hotbeds of Tibetan tradition. Settlements like Clear Water were built as transition communities, temporary stopping places where Tibetans were processed into lives that would be more aligned with the socialist cause.
As his truck crested the hill a gasp escaped Shan’s lips. He halted, hands on the wheel. He had traveled across the changtang, had befriended some of the joyful, free-spirited nomads whose clans had called that wild land their home for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. The nomads had been corralled like sheep in a pen. Scores of small identical square buildings lay in rows before him, all with the same corrugated metal roofs and metal doors, the same single window and steel pipe chimney.
As he left his truck by the entrance a plump Chinese man bounded out of a long cinder block structure that apparently served as the camp’s office.
He greeted Shan as if he were a long-awaited guest. “Comrade! Welcome to Clear Water Resettlement Camp!” He paused, glancing at Shan’s truck, parked far enough way so that its faded government insignia was visible, but not the words underneath. “How may I assist?”
“Just a quick look on my own,” Shan ventured, then turned to the man with a stern air. “How many do you account for here?”
“We accommodate one hundred and twenty-seven citizens, with room for dozens more. One of the great successes of redistribution.”
“Successes?” Shan asked.
“Of course. We are able to administer medical care, provide dry sleeping quarters, provide two meals a day. Schoolteachers may arrive any day. None of which they had before. Sixty percent have already taken Chinese names, qualifying them for electrical feeds, so electrical distribution into households of reformed nomads is at unprecedented levels. Nearly half are taking the Chinese history modules sent by Beijing. Very encouraging statistics. We are passing out new bedding,” he added, pointing to a pile of tattered sheets by the door of his office. “Historic breakthroughs.”
Shan saw the empty stares of the Tibetan men and women who sat before the little huts. The encouraging statistics.
“Where do they work?”
“No need. They are provided for. Employment will be found for them in a few months, after they graduate from my finishing school,” the manager explained, grinning at his own wit. “Some have found a few sheep to tend to. More like pets.” The man gestured toward the administration building, the stuccoed wall of which was adorned with a mural of ebullient factory workers. “I have the numbers if you wish to review them. We are ahead of our quotas. Best performance in the entire prefecture.”
Shan fought a shudder. “I think I will just look for myself,” he said.
“Let me just lock up,” the manager said.
“Alone.”
“I don’t usually let-”
“You would rather have me tell Colonel Tan you impeded my report?”
The man shrank back and shot a nervous glance up the road before retreating into his building.
None of the displaced shepherds would look at Shan as he walked down the first of the narrow streets. The little prefabricated structures, each the size of a small garage, had metal frames into which sheets of plywood had been inserted. Only a handful of the metal chimney pipes showed any smoke. Several of the inhabitants were cooking at small braziers by their doors. Electric wires dangled low between buildings. A woman carrying towels herded three children from a long squat structure at the end of the block, apparently the community washhouse. Half a dozen other women waited with buckets in a line at a spigot that was spitting up brown water.
Shan tried to look into the faces of the shepherds. Most turned their backs on him. An old man, sitting on a bench made of cinder blocks and planks, looked up from the block of wood he was carving. Shan sat beside him, offering the man a roll of hard candy he found in his pocket. The man accepted the token with a nod and returned to his work. He was whittling the figure of a sheep.
“Tell me, Grandfather, what became of your flocks?”
The man rubbed his stubble of whiskers before replying. “They waited until we had the flocks all gathered. We were preparing for our clan’s lambing festival. Two sets of livestock trucks came that day. One set took the sheep, one took the shepherds. At some camps they just machine-gunned the animals, even the dogs. My granddaughter managed to get her puppy on the truck. The next day a soldier killed it with the butt of his gun. He told her it was just the right size for the army stew pot.”
Shan glanced back at the administration building. The manager was watching him through a crack in the door. “I am sorry.”
The man nodded again.
Shan studied the man’s leathery, wrinkled face as he whittled. He was old, in his eighties or even nineties. “I traveled in the changtang once,” Shan said. “For as far as I could see it was a sea of grass, rolling like waves in the wind. I don’t think I ever felt so free.”
“Some in our clan ran away that day. I was their headman. Rapeche they call me. They need me. I am worthless here. The soil of our lands flows in my blood. I tried to go back. Last month I started walking down the road but a day later the knobs picked me up.” The old shepherd paused, then shrugged. “They gave us papers that say we have to stay in this county, unless we get their signature on a pass. Except they never give their signature.”
They were in a prison without bars. Shan looked up and down the track between the houses. “Where are the young men and women?”
“The Chinese from the relocation office told all the families that their young had to serve the people. Sent to factories in China. I said to them we were people too, and they laughed. My granddaughter is in Guangdong now. She writes us once a month. She makes socks for sale in America. Works twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. Sleeps in a dormitory with two hundred other girls. She says she found an old temple and borrows a bicycle to ride there on her day off. She lights incense for us.”
Two young boys ran past, kicking a tin can, then stopped near the spigot. One of the women had fallen to her knees, crying, as another kicked the spigot.
The headman frowned. “The fools who built this place knew nothing about campsites. No protection from the wind. Hardly any water. They drilled half a dozen wells and they all went dry but that one. Clear Water, my ass.” He shrugged again. “They say they will leave a tank truck in the parking lot.”
“I am looking for a man named Jigten. He has a limp.”
“Which is why they wouldn’t take him for the factories,” Rapeche said. “His mother hardly has the strength to get out of bed. Her lungs are rattling. He does things to help her that she would never approve of, if she knew.” He shrugged once more and kept whittling. “We do what we have to do to survive.”
The hut the old man directed Shan to, the last in the northernmost row, appeared unoccupied. There were no coals in the brazier by the door, none of the carefully tended vegetable shoots that grew along the front walls of other huts. But from a rope fixed to a nail on the rear corner bits of cloth fluttered in the wind. Someone had turned their new sheet into prayer flags.