“There’s nerve damage,” she declared. “You should go to Lhasa for a scan. Who knows what damage there is to your brain.” She had cleaned the oozing burn on his scalp where Liang had pressed the taser.
“I thought perhaps a couple of aspirin,” Shan said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Like a blade is in my skull, twisting back and forth.”
The Chinese woman frowned. “You must rest. Take a week off. You could kill yourself if you push hard.”
He heard the door open behind him. The assistant in the office had been furious when Tan’s guards had shoved Shan in ahead of the half-dozen patients waiting there.
The nurse frowned and handed him an unlabeled bottle of red pills. “Go home. Let your family nurse you.”
“An excellent suggestion,” came a voice behind him.
Shan turned to see Professor Yuan at his shoulder. “Shall we go, Xiao Shan?” the professor asked with a sweep of his hand toward the door. Xiao Shan. It was how an uncle might address the younger members of his family.
“I can’t…” Shan murmured.
“You can,” Yuan insisted, and pulled him up from the exam table. “You will. We have a dilemma we need you to resolve.”
Shan followed in a fog of pain and fatigue. A quarter hour later he collapsed on a bed in the professor’s house, having swallowed a bowl of broth and two of the red pills.
When he awoke it was dark. A candle burned by his bed. He looked out at the moon. He had slept for at least ten hours. The scalding pain in his head was gone, replaced with a dull ache. He extended his fingers. On one hand they stayed straight, on the other they instantly curled back up. He tried to stand, and fell back on the bed. For a long time he stared at the floor as memories of his imprisonment returned, then he reached inside his shirt and straightened the wad of paper he had retrieved from the wastebasket. It was a blank prisoner assignment form. Meng had not thrown out his letter. She had performed a charade for the surveillance camera to save his letter to Ko.
From the sitting room he heard gentle laughter and the sound of several voices speaking in Chinese. With a strange awkwardness he approached the door, then hesitated, looking about the room as if for the first time. There was a dresser with framed photos of a much younger Yuan with his wife and daughter Sansan, several of Sansan alone. There were three sheets of graceful calligraphy pinned to the wall, lines from ancient poems, beside pegs hung with clothing.
He steadied himself on the back of a chair, fighting a new wave of emotion. This was how the home of a family looked. Never in Shan’s life had he had such a place, such a home, and he knew that he probably never would. He forced himself to look away, then opened the door, stepped out, and froze.
Four men and a woman, all in their late sixties or seventies, sat around the table. A pall of tobacco smoke hung over the candlelit room. A bottle of cheap rice wine and glasses were on the table, in the center of which were several dice and a bundle of sticks. It was a scene of his youth, when the older inhabitants of his block stayed up into the small hours of the morning, tossing numbers to consult the I Ching. It was a timeless scene, a fixture of Chinese villages for centuries.
Professor Yuan looked up from the table. “Xiao Shan! Please come sit with us! We are eager for your advice.”
As the professor introduced Shan to his companions Shan realized he had seen most of them before, playing chess or checkers in the town square.
“The hero of the hammer,” proclaimed the oldest of the men, a nearly bald man with thick horn-rimmed glasses. “You know, they wrapped a white canvas around the statue afterwards. In the moonlight he is the ghost of Baiyun.” He lifted his glass of wine to Shan. “They will replace him eventually. But because of you we will always see it as just another ghost. A noseless ghost,” he said with a wheezing laugh. “We salute you for being brave enough to do what each of us has dreamed of doing ever since they put that damned statue up.”
Shan silently accepted a glass of wine and sat beside the professor. “You mentioned a dilemma?”
“Our little society strives to better understand the old ways. I know you are well versed in tradition.” Yuan gestured to a long scroll of paper opened and weighed down with books at each end. The elderly woman was painting with watercolors on the thick parchment. The images progressed from skyscrapers and city blocks shaded with trees to trains and mountains, then yaks and donkeys. With a flash of excitement he realized she was recording the story of the Harbin exiles in the scroll painting style that had been used to chronicle events during the imperial reigns. He had seen the scroll before, when Yuan had hidden it behind his back to keep the knobs from discovering it. “We have been debating a point of court ceremony,” Yuan explained.
Shan looked uncertainly around the table. All of those present were older than him, some of them by decades. He reminded himself that the emigrants forced to move to the village had all been retired professors. “Society?” he asked.
“We call ourselves the Vermilion Society after the color of the ink reserved for the old imperial courts. Keeping old ways alive. Professor Wu,” he said, indicating the bald man, “prints up Sung poems and leaves them on doorsteps. Professor Chou,” he said, with a gesture to the woman, “organized a production of an old play from the Ming dynasty. We’d sweep old graves if there were any here. We try to remember things from old China and record them. There’re so few good history books left, and it’s been decades since a true history of China was written. There are wonderful things from the dynasties, things that need to be remembered.”
“The truest history,” interjected Professor Wu, “is that built on a thousand tales of the common man.”
From the kitchen came the sound of low coughing. Sansan stood in the shadows. Shan offered a hesitant nod to Wu. “In the People’s Republic that can be dangerous ground.”
The old professor’s eyes gleamed. “Don’t you know we are all here because we are dangerous people? What are they going to do to us? Exile us to Tibet?” Another raspy laugh escaped his throat.
Despite his pain, Shan couldn’t suppress the grin that tugged at his mouth.
The woman at the table held up a large sheet of paper bearing small sketches, the first of which was a bird with three legs, a hen in a circle, and a dragon.
Shan cocked his head. “Symbols of the emperor.”
Professor Chou’s face lit with satisfaction. “Yuan said you knew your history! We are making a collaborative painting of an emperor’s robe, then we hope to make an exact replica if we can find the silk. But we can’t agree.” She pointed to two more symbols, one of three dots connected by lines, one of seven connected dots. “Professor Yuan says there are three and I say seven.”
There was something inside Shan that rejoiced at the absurdity of their sitting here in the remote exile community of Tibet debating imperial customs. He paused, venturing into a musty corridor of his memory. “Professor Yuan is from Manchuria, home of the Qing dynasty,” he quietly explained. “The Ming emperors used a full seven stars to show the constellation of the Great Bear, though they called it the Bushel then. But when Qing emperors arrived from the north they abbreviated it to three. Apologies, Hsien Sheng,” he said to Yuan with a slight bow of his head. “Elder born,” it meant, a homage paid to teachers.
Yuan silently smiled, and urged Shan to drink his wine. The woman clapped her hands in triumph.
“You’ll have to decide about the beads always worn with such a robe,” Shan continued after draining his glass. “They were traditionally red coral beads but late in his reign the Qianlong emperor declared that white Manchurian pearls would henceforth be worn.”
The group gave a collective murmur of respect, then quickly followed with a energetic discussion of court ritual. When Shan volunteered that for years he had spent much of his spare time in Beijing exploring every nook of the Forbidden City, they filled his wine cup again and with great enthusiasm fired new queries at him about the proper order of ranks in imperial processions, ceremonies for erecting new temples, archery competitions, and a dozen other aspects of imperial life.