An old woman standing on the top step cast them a scolding look, then stepped aside at a murmured syllable from Lokesh. Shan pushed open the door to find more rows of pallets along the walls of the building. Except half the occupants were not lying on them, but sat with legs folded underneath, murmuring prayers as they worked their malas, their prayer beads. The end of the long hall was covered with the chalked images of deities.
“Ani Ama organized it the first day we were here. She calls it our secret army,” Lokesh explained, then pulled Shan back out of the doorway.
As harsh as it was, the internment camp was indeed not one of the hard-labor prisons Shan was used to, with strict regimens enforced with merciless brutality. He recalled what Jigten had called the place. Not a prison, just a cage with no way out. They paused at a hand pump where Lokesh worked the handle as Shan held his head in the stream of cold water, then found a seat in a decrepit lean-to, out of sight of the guards.
Lokesh spoke of his final journey with the dead lama as if Jamyang had been alive, recounting how the stars had danced overhead as they had climbed at night, how butterflies had often alighted on Jamyang, how the ragyapa, the flesh cutters, had shown him with great reverence a meteorite that had landed, glowing red-hot, in their yard of bones the week before.
Shan explained what he had learned since leaving his friend, though he could not bring himself to repeat Chenmo’s strange tale of seeing Jamyang on the highway.
“Did they get away?” he asked, “the ones with the abbess?”
“I am sure of it.” Lokesh nodded. “If they had been caught they would be here. The abbess is safe. That meteorite, it was a sign the boneyard is still protected by the deities.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward Shan. “Ani Ama told me there is a little hut at the hermitage where there are nuns at all hours, taking turns, always at least two, saying the rites for the full cycle.”
The full cycle. Lokesh meant the full forty-nine days that comprised the mourning period of old Tibet. “For Jamyang and the abbess. It will help them find the next step that is destined for them.” Lokesh straightened, then cast a faraway look toward the sacred mountain. “Up and down,” he said solemnly.
Shan realized after a moment that his friend was referring to the levels of the next existence, the next spiritual stage for the dead. The fact that Jamyang had taken four, that he was a suicide, weighed heavily on Lokesh. The traditional Tibetans believed suicides and those who killed suffered terrible punishment, then were reincarnated far down the chain of existence. It could take them hundreds of lifetimes to reach the human form again.
“They’re going to find the American, Lokesh,” Shan said after a long silence. “It won’t go well for her when they do. No one outside knows she’s here. They don’t have to account for her.”
“I have been thinking about that, about how many of the people here have not even recognized her as an outsider. Her complexion is dark. She cut her hair.” There was an odd pleading in his eyes as Lokesh looked back at Shan. “What if this was meant to be her path, what if she were intended to become a nun in Tibet? How many times have I heard you say you were transformed when you came here. Maybe this is just the passage she must endure to be transformed.”
Shan felt a melancholy grin tug at his mouth. He was so tired, so sore. He would like nothing more than to sit and soothe himself with his friend’s gentle vision of the world. “They will find her,” he said instead. “Someone will tell them. Someone always tells them. You know how it works. A criticism session where prisoners are forced to speak of other inmates. Or she will give herself away. She speaks almost no Tibetan. It is a miracle she has lasted this long. I have to talk with her.”
Lokesh smiled, then shrugged. “A miracle, like you say. And what was it that kept you alive in prison, my friend?”
Shan felt a flush of emotion as he returned the old Tibetan’s gaze. “A miracle,” he whispered. He turned away with a sigh. “I have to get her out.”
“She won’t speak with you.”
“Take me to her. You have to let me try. She could die.”
There was pleading in his friend’s eyes now. “Don’t do it, Shan. Don’t take her back to the death, to the blackness of murder. I think she is trying to become a nun. Ani Ama says the deities must have intended it. The abbess dies in an unexpected way, a new nun arrives in an unexpected way.”
Shan sighed and gazed out over the camp. “I remember in our prison how one of the old monks found an injured bird. Everyone else would have eaten it but the two of you made a little cage for it out of an old basket. The lama grew very fond of it. But when it was healed you told him he had to keep the door of the cage open. You said it should not decide its fate based on fear. You said it had to follow its true nature. The bird flew away.”
Shan saw in his eyes that Lokesh understood. “She can’t become a nun out of fear,” he continued. “She can only make that decision once she is free.”
Lokesh turned to Shan in silence. Shan had seen the gaze before. There was patience and affection in it, but also disappointment.
“Once I was being taken for punishment,” Shan said after a moment, shuddering at the memory. The Chinese guards had always singled him out for special punishment for helping the Tibetan prisoners. He had been treated as a traitor for doing so. “You told me the pain would never reach inside as long as I would just act true. She has to act true. She has to let me help her so she can help us.”
“What you mean,” Lokesh said after a long moment, “is that she can only be a nun if she stops being a nun. But that,” he added, “is not something you or I can ask of her.”
* * *
As he paced along the grounds Shan unsuccessfully tried to convince himself that the pain he felt was that left by the police batons. He cherished Lokesh like a second father and knew the affection was reciprocated. Yet every few months a rift seemed to open between them, a gap that seemed impossible to bridge. Once he had believed it grew out of Lokesh’s steadfast belief in allowing fate to take its own course, because the deities would eventually find the solutions to all problems, while Shan constantly wanted to challenge the course of events. But Shan had begun to glimpse something new. The hope of resurrecting the old ways that had nourished men like Lokesh for decades was beginning to die and it was Shan’s country that was killing it. Just as Lokesh had once been part of the Dalai Lama’s government, Shan had once been part of the government that was destroying Tibet. They were just actors on a stage at the end of time. A great sadness welled within him. Suddenly his fatigue was overpowering.
He sat against one of the only trees in the compound, which had been stripped of bark and lower branches for firewood, and watched life in the camp. Prisoners began pouring out of the mess hall, their catechism for the morning done. A loudspeaker crackled to life and began playing a favorite Party anthem. “The East Is Red.”
Shan leaned his head against the dying tree, studying the movements of the guards, the placements of the watchtowers, the intermittent activity at the main gate and the smaller one at the rear of the facility. His eyelids grew heavy, and he was unable to fight his drowsiness.
When he awoke, one of his tattered shoes was off. Lokesh was sitting beside him, mending it with needle and thread. At Shan’s side was a tin mug of porridge.
“That’s all there is for two meals a day,” Lokesh explained as Shan lifted the mug and poked at the thin gruel with a finger. It was pasty and granular.
“Sawdust,” he muttered in disgust. The guards were mixing the grain with sawdust.
Lokesh offered a matter-of-fact nod as he continued his task. “There is no shortage of grain this year. Someone is getting rich on the prisoners’ empty bellies. Not enough blankets, not enough toilet paper, not enough clothing.” It was a common aspect of most Chinese prisons. The guards diverted provisions to sell on the black market.