The sick in the bunkers had no notion of day or night. He stepped down into the fetid air of the first one to a cacaphony of moans and mantras. In the dim light of candles he saw four Tibetans on pallets, the nearest clutching his belly, his face contorted in pain. The others were shaking with fever. Two women, one a nun, tended them, ladling water to their lips and wiping their brows. An old man, his face covered with sweat, clutched a deep blue stone in his hands. It was lapis, used to invoke the healing deity.
“How may I help?” he asked the nun. She cast him a quick weary glance and pointed toward a bucket of night soil in the corner. He stepped around the pallets, confirming that no one else was in the shadows before retrieving the bucket and taking it to dump outside.
In the second bunker he helped change a pallet and watched as a nun and her novice constructed a mandala, a circular sand painting to invoke the protection of the lapis Buddha. The tiny clockwork tapping of the narrow sand funnels brought memories of other such furtive mandalas, in prisons where men Shan had known risked beatings for making such images.
He was disheartened as he exited the bunker, painfully aware that he was running out of time. But as he stepped into the moonlight a low whistle rose from behind him. He turned to see a dim light in the entrance of one of the crumbling bunkers. It was Lokesh, holding a candle within a tin can into which holes had been punched. It was a prisoner’s lantern, one of the makeshift devices they had once used to conduct illegal rituals in their gulag barracks. Suddenly a searchlight in the nearest tower lit the field. Shan ducked and ran.
“When they find you they will beat you,” Shan whispered when he reached his friend. It had been one of their secret greetings for admission to prison rituals.
“They can only beat my body,” came the reflexive reply, with a flash of a grin. Lokesh gestured him inside and dropped a heavy felt blanket over the entrance behind Shan.
The bunker was in decay, its roof buckling, its air damp and musty. A rodent scurried in the darkness. At first Shan thought Lokesh had only summoned him to speak, but then he saw the low grey shape huddled in a corner.
They said nothing as they sat beside her, Lokesh on one side and Shan on the other, the makeshift lantern on the ground before the woman. She clenched a mala in fingers that trembled. “Ani!” she cried in a hoarse voice. “Ani!” “Nun,” she was saying, “nun.” Her eyes were wild with fear.
Lokesh reached out and took her hand. With his fingers over hers, he gently moved one bead, then another, slowly reciting the mani mantra, as if he were teaching it to a child, working her fingers in tandem with his own.
The woman, her frightened gaze fixed on the Chinese stranger who had appeared before her, at first seemed unaware of what Lokesh was doing. Then gradually, with nervous glances back at Shan, she began to watch the two hands on the beads. An odd confusion grew on her face, as if she did not understand whose hands they were, and her fingers tightened as if to draw away. Then she focused on the serene face of the old Tibetan and slowly relaxed.
They sat unmoving for several minutes, the only sound that of the quiet mantra and the soft rattle of the beads.
Shan at last spoke, using English. “Lokesh and I would go to the ruins at night sometimes. We would clean up some of the old wall paintings. In the moonlight sometimes it felt like the deities were coming to life.”
The woman reacted slowly, as if not certain she had heard correctly. It had been a long time, he realized, since she had heard her native language. She cast a worried glance toward the entry.
“I attacked a statue of Mao just to be able to see you, Cora,” Shan ventured.
She looked back at Lokesh, who had not ceased his mantra. Slowly she pulled her hand away. Lokesh produced his own mala and continued the mantra.
“Elves,” she whispered. “Rutger and I saw paintings mysteriously cleaned overnight, with little offerings left before them. We joked that there must be magical elves. Once, the abbot and the monks started a sand painting.” The American gazed at her beads as she spoke. “The abbess saw it at the end of the day and said part of it was wrong, that some of the deities had been placed in the wrong order. But the next day they were correct. Some of the nuns said it was a miracle, that the deities must have moved themselves.”
“The miracle,” Shan said with a gesture toward Lokesh, “is that there are those of old Tibet still among us who know the way of the deities.”
The American woman looked up from her beads and studied Lokesh as if seeing him for the first time. “Does he speak English?” she asked Shan.
“No. Lokesh says the most important speaking is done without words.”
The old Tibetan had his eyes closed as he murmured his mantra. As Cora watched him her expression changed from fascination to melancholy. “He was arrested because of me. I fell down when we were being chased. He could have escaped but he came for me. He saw me in a robe. He thought I was a nun. He’s here because of my lie.”
Shan was beginning to glimpse the depth of the woman’s pain. “No. It had nothing to do with the robe, Cora. You fell. You needed help.”
“And he is in this awful prison because of it.”
“Lokesh and I know what a prison is. This is more like a retreat for like-minded people.”
A spark seemed to flicker in the woman’s eyes for a moment, then faded. “People are dying.”
Shan nodded. “You and Rutger were right in wanting the world to know about such places.”
Cora looked up in alarm, seeming about to deny Shan’s suggestion, but then she looked away, back at her beads. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Rutger was the photographer. I was the artist who sketched faces. I began to do so on scrap paper. I have thirty pages already. I could sketch a whole book of the faces I have seen here.”
“You must do so,” Shan said. “Give them to the world.”
“I was going to wrap them in a cloth and throw them over the wire in the hope someone would find them.”
“That’s not what Rutger would want.”
It was the wrong thing to say. At the mention of Rutger’s name the woman’s face tightened. She pressed back against the wall, seeming to shrink before his eyes. Her knuckles holding the beads were white.
“You need to let me help you, Cora,” Shan said.
She shook her head slowly and began rocking back and forth.
“Please. You don’t understand the danger you face. We haven’t much time. It will be dawn soon.”
She seemed unaware of their presence now. She rocked like a small frightened child. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a worried glance. The risk that they would be discovered by the guards increased every minute.
When the American opened her eyes they seemed to have no focus. Then slowly her rocking stopped and she was looking over the lantern. Lokesh’s hand was facing downward, with his thumb and little finger spread, the middle fingers curled toward the thumb.
“It’s one of those hand prayers,” she said.
“A mudra,” Shan confirmed. “It is the sign of giving refuge, Cora. On the long winter nights when we lay shivering and starving in the gulag the old lamas would light a candle. One would walk with it along the bunks while another made a mudra. It was like a holy thing, like a relic brought to life. They would teach us to focus on it, to forget all else but the mudra of the night. It kept some of the prisoners alive.”
Cora looked back at Shan. “Gulag?”
“Lokesh spent much of his life in prison, because he had been in the Dalai Lama’s government.” Lokesh kept looking at the woman with a serene expression, his hand still in the mudra. “These are his words to you,” Shan said. “He and I offer you refuge. You can sketch all of his mudras. Chenmo will help. He could tell you of the old days, and of prison. It could be your book.”