The brush behind him rattled and he turned to see an old woman stepping into the little clearing. She held a sack of grain in one hand, a stone pestle in the other. She began to settle by a worn indentation in the rock when she gasped, startled by his presence.
“I am only passing by,” Shan offered.
The woman seemed about to back away, then her gaze fell on the gau that had slipped outside of Shan’s shirt. “A pilgrim?” she suggested.
“Just a pilgrim,” Shan said.
“A pilgrim in the shadows,” the old Tibetan observed.
Shan took the words as an expression of suspicion, but then the woman sighed. “The only way a pilgrim can be safe in these times is to walk in the shadows like the rest of us.”
She settled onto the ledge and emptied the grain sack into the bowl in the rock. As she lifted her pestle she looked up at Shan. “It’s something my grandmother used to do when she was a cook for the gompa. Every village used to have a rock like this. I come up once a month, to keep the rock alive.”
Shan nodded. “My grandmother used to let me work the bellows on her stove when she made dumplings. She would tell me that no one could say they made their own dumplings unless they made the flour themselves.”
An uncertain smile crossed the woman’s countenance and she silently began grinding the barley kernels. Shan watched her with a strange ache in his heart. The sound of the grinding was like that of a stream flowing over pebbles. A wren lit on the ground and the woman extended a kernel on her palm, which the little bird readily accepted.
“Your grandmother fed many more monks than live here today,” he said after turning back toward the compound.
“They have a difficult time. Most of the monks refused to sign those loyalty oaths and the government was going to close it down, finish the demolition they started so many years ago. But Abbot Norbu came. He saved the monks. He saved the gompa.”
Shan looked back at the courtyard. “He saved it by raising a Chinese flag?”
The woman shrugged. “He saved it. He saves it every month,” she added with a nod toward a nondescript building just outside the gate.
Shan saw monks on the bench by the door of the building, then fought a shudder as a monk emerged from the door, followed by a grey-uniformed officer.
“Public Security comes every month?” he asked as the officer gestured the next monk inside.
“Sometimes the knobs. Sometimes Religious Affairs. Sometimes both.”
Gompas were audited. Gompas had periodic fidelity reviews. Gompas were required to certify allegiance and verify registration of all monks, but Shan had never heard of such a small gompa attracting monthly enforcement visits. “Why so often?” he asked. “What is so special about this gompa?”
When the woman looked up there was a perverse grin on her face.
“Perhaps not the gompa,” Shan ventured. “The village. What did the village do?”
“Ten years ago there was a farmer here whose children came home one day with Chinese names pinned to their clothes. When they told him the teachers would no longer allow them to use their birth names, he decided to start his own classes, at night, after the Chinese teachers were gone. By the time the Chinese found out about it he had become famous in the valley. When they came looking for him he retreated into the mountains, and they arrested a few who had helped him. He came down to help those in trouble with the government. He began guiding Tibetans across the border, past the army patrols. Public Security put a bounty on his head after he took his family to India. He is in the exile government today, an important official. Public Security knows he has relatives here.”
“Any who are monks?”
“One. A nephew named Dakpo.”
“Were any in the gompa arrested?”
“One. But he came back.”
Shan watched the monks nervously waiting on the bench, saw now how those who finished with Public Security reentered the compound and disappeared into one of the buildings. “Arrested for what exactly?”
“Speaking the way a Tibetan should speak,” she replied. Challenge entered her voice. She would speak no more.
Shan murmured his thanks, then slipped down the path toward the village. He stepped into a stable and studied the hamlet through a gap in its plank walls. On the slope behind a farmhouse, out of sight of the knobs, a woman hurried an adolescent girl away with a basket of grain, the reflex of a people used to being harassed by tax collectors. An old man with a wispy beard wearing a black vest sat upright on a chair outside the door of another house, his hand perched on a cane, his head slightly cocked toward the gompa as if listening for something. Two children ran by, chased by a puppy. A woman laughed as a goat pulled a piece of laundry from a clothesline and ran down the street. The old man did not react to any of the movements. He was blind, Shan realized.
He waited as one monk, then another, finished with the knobs, exiting the building without a word to their companions, looking straight ahead, their faces tight with fear. Many such knob squads worked under a quota, so that they would always find someone to be punished. Each of the monks gripped tattered papers in one hand. Examinations always started with a knob scrutinizing identity cards and Religious Affairs registrations, sometimes questioning every line anew.
He saw the despair on the faces of those who sat waiting on the bench. Some of them were young novices but most were old enough to understand that this kind of scrutiny meant the gompa was in grave danger. A few hasty signatures from Religious Affairs and Public Security and all their hopeful prayers, their reverent memorization of thousands of lines of scriptures, all the flames of their offering lamps, would be snuffed out. Padlocks would be mounted on the compound doors. Prayers would be spoken no more, forever.
A thin clear note suddenly split the silence. The monk who had just finished his interview quickened his pace. Another note brought monks out of several gompa buildings. A monk stood by one of the inner doors, ringing a ritual bell. Several villagers hurried to the buckets by the entries to their houses, rinsing their hands and faces. Only the monks on the bench did not move.
The old man rose on shaking legs, leaning on his cane. Shan pulled his hat low over his brow and darted outside, reaching the man in time to steady him as he tripped on a stone.
The blind man turned his head only slightly, hesitating. “You’re a stranger,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Allow a poor pilgrim to gain favor, Grandfather,” Shan replied, putting his hand lightly on the man’s elbow to guide him.
The man sighed, then nodded. “My niece is in the pastures or she would take me. Just as well when these vultures come to town.”
“Lha gyal lo,” was Shan’s reply.
The little temple was lit only by sputtering butter lamps along the altar. Incense curled around a simple bronze Buddha. In a voice as thin as the smoke, a monk below the altar read scripture as Abbot Norbu stood silently beside him. The assembled monks and villagers murmured responses then, when the reading was done, Norbu led them in a long mantra. The words were pronounced softly at first, in the near whispers Shan usually heard in such rituals but then to his surprise, the blind man beside him lifted his bowed head and interrupted, speaking a new mantra, more loudly toward the ceiling. Shan watched in confusion as the voices of the others faded, then joined him. As the volume rose, seeming to take on what seemed almost a defiant tone, a monk rose and pushed a bolt on the door. Norbu cast a nervous glance toward the door, then pushed aside a dark swath of felt hanging below from the altar and reached into the shadows, extracting an ornate silver bell with a dragon elegantly worked around its handle. A shiver of excitement coursed through the congregated monks as Norbu bent again and pulled out another deity which he set beside the Buddha. It was a morbid, frightful image of a bull-headed god holding flayed human skins and skulls. The image unmasked by Norbu was one of the most fierce of the protector demons. Norbu reached behind the altar for a cloth that he draped over the figure. It was the flag of free Tibet.