As Sansan brought in fresh tea the talk turned to ancient poetry and the old tales of heroes. “My favorite of all was Sung Chiang,” she offered.
Professor Chou, who explained she was a retired professor of literature, nodded. “The Water Margin,” she added, referring to the Ming dynasty novel about the rebel Sung Chiang, who forayed out of his marshland lair to defend peasants against injustice.
“History and heroes repeat themselves,” Professor Yuan observed.
Shan suddenly realized that everyone was looking at him, grinning. He flushed with color, then, mumbling an excuse, stood and fled out the kitchen door.
He sat on a bench set against the rear wall of the house, watching the moon rise over parched, spindly trees. His mind wandered, toward the mountains, toward the little cottage where he prayed Lokesh and Cora Michener were safely hiding.
“The most enduring myths are all based on fact.”
He started at the sudden words and looked up to see the professor’s daughter standing beside the bench.
Sansan continued without waiting for his reply. “My father says if you look hard enough in Tibet you can see the myths come to life.”
Shan said nothing, just moved to make room for her as she sat beside him.
“Robin Hood, bandit of the forest,” she said. “He was the Western equivalent of Sung Chiang, bandit of the marshes. They dared to defy the government, they brought justice when no one else knew how to find it.”
“I am no Sung Chiang,” Shan whispered.
Sansan seemed not to hear him. “In the city there is so much noise and clutter. Everything moves so quickly. It is easy to miss the important things. Here we have learned to cultivate the quiet, as the old Confucians would say, so there is always time for the important things. Here people speak of deities like they are next-door neighbors. They talk of myths as if they were just family histories.”
Shan turned to look at the girl. She had been the ringleader of the dissidents, the reason all the families had been exiled to Tibet. She looked like a young schoolgirl but spoke with the weary wisdom of one far older.
She met his gaze. “You make the people of this valley believe in heroes.”
“You confuse me with someone else.”
Sansan shrugged. “Then let’s just say you inspire them to action. You make me worry for my father.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He says we can’t stand by and do nothing.” She looked up at the moon with an odd longing. “We have very little money. He’s been eating only rice and putting money aside to buy books and ink and brushes for his calligraphy. He offered some of it, enough for a dozen books, to that lame shepherd, Jigten.”
A chill ran down Shan’s back. “For what purpose?”
“To translate a little journal Jamyang left with my father for safekeeping. It was like a trade. Jamyang kept our artifacts safe and we kept his writings safe. But it’s almost all in Tibetan. Jamyang was a complex man. My father says those murders must have had something to do with Jamyang, that he knows you must think so too.” When she turned to Shan there was pleading in her eyes. “He says the journal was meant for Tibetans but if they act on it they will be punished. He says he must understand it, to use the answers it provides. We will not sit back and do nothing when there are wrongs being committed among us. He says you have shown us.”
Shan sighed. “I am an example for no one.” His throat was dry, his voice hoarse. “He can’t…” His words drifted away as he recalled the tranquil bedroom he had been in. “He has too much to lose.”
“We have nothing to lose. The government liberated us by sending us here.”
Shan’s heart seemed to sag. “Surely he must understand. He has you. You have each other. You have a home.” He could not bear the thought of being responsible for the professor and his daughter being separated and sent into the gulag.
In the silence that followed he could hear the voices from inside, softly reading old verses by candlelight. He did not even realize the girl had left the bench until she stepped back out of the door, holding her laptop computer. She gestured him toward the little toolshed at the back of the yard.
Inside, she unfolded the computer on the workbench. The screen burst to life and she began tapping on the keyboard. A moment later, a scanned document appeared, in Jamyang’s familiar handwriting.
“Two dozen pages in all,” the woman said, showing him how to scan through the pages. “Some pinned together, some pages of different sizes, like he was just writing on whatever paper was available.”
It was not really a journal, Shan saw as he skimmed through the pages, but notes, random entries of life in the valley, of work on his shrine and the deities they uncovered with their cleaning brushes. One page was just a list of Tibetan gods and their protector demons. He pointed to a smudge of color in the top-left corner of the page. “What is this?”
Sansan ran the cursor over the page and tapped another key, magnifying the image. A Tibetan chorten was revealed in pale red ink, with a heavy hammer imposed over it.
A grim silence descended over them.
Shan rubbed the ache at his forehead. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he whispered uneasily “He was using whatever paper he could find.”
“A sacred Tibetan sign under a symbol of the Communist Party. Where would he find such paper?”
Shan did not answer. “What did Jamyang say when he gave this to your father?” he asked.
“Only that it was important. Or more exactly,” she said, as if correcting herself, “that one day it might become important. Later he told me I should scan it into my computer, just in case. I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except-”
Shan completed her sentence. “Except he died.” He scrolled to the final page. It was a list of artifacts. A ritual dagger with a ruby in its pommel. A bronze trumpet. Three ritual masks with a detailed description of the demons they represented. He knew them. They were from the convent ruins, the very artifacts he and Lokesh had shown to Jamyang, artifacts Jamyang had helped clean and hide.
He slowly searched through the other pages. There were lists of ceremonies conducted by monks and nuns in the valley, with dates for each, as well as lists of shrines, most of them publicly known but some secret. There was a sketch of four young Tibetans blowing a long duncheng horn, with the caption “Sound of Freedom.” One page, obviously written in ink and pencil at different times, listed the names of monks and lamas under the heading “Chegar gompa.” Years had been written by many of the names, some as far back as three decades, some as recent as the year before. At the bottom of the page were three names with a circle around them. Abbot Norbu and his two attendants Dakpo and Trinle.
One day these pages would become important. “What was it your father and Jamyang spoke of when they were together?” he asked.
“History. Literature. Jamyang would translate some of the old Tibetan poems into Chinese. Sometimes they would speak of their own histories. My father’s teaching career. How we were accused and sent here. Jamyang liked to speak of his boyhood on a farm in the mountains north of here.”
“Did he ever speak of his recent past?”
“Not that I ever heard. We always understood he was a lama, a senior teacher. So he would have started as a monk at an early age, my father said.” She hesitated. “There was one night when a truck filled with Tibetans bound for one of the camps passed by the little grove of trees where we sat. Jamyang was sitting with us outside. He grew very sad. After a long silence he asked my father if he thought a man would be punished in this life for sins of his past life. My father just laughed and said Jamyang was confusing him for another lama.”