“Those are dangerous words, Lieutenant. Especially for someone who’s been broken in rank already. Take my advice and go home. You’re only a lieutenant this time. A sergeant’s pay is hard to live on.”
Meng shrugged. “Less paperwork. More time in the field. I enjoy the fresh air.”
“You’ve been in Tibet too long. I sense a perilous contamination.”
“What are you doing?”
“You said it before. I am the only one interested in finding out why Jamyang and the others died.” He studied Meng. Behind the weariness on her face was a glint of determination. “Go home,” he repeated. “Go back and do whatever it takes to get Major Liang out of your district.”
“The highway’s being shut down for twelve hours starting at noon. Prisoner convoys. There will be checkpoints and guards everywhere. You’ll never make it through without an escort.”
“I fear for you, Lieutenant. I sense you are dangerously close to an antisocialist act.”
Meng leaned against her car. Her gaze became distant, aimed toward the far horizon. “I have a confession. I was ordered to make sure a canvas was tied around that statue of the Helmsman after you smashed his face. But I went back last night and cut the ropes holding the canvas, let it blow away in the wind. And I didn’t even leave. I sat on a bench and stared at him. I remember a story I heard once about an emperor with no clothes. No one would ever call him naked. A dog came up and peed on the pedestal. I laughed out loud. I felt more free than I had in years.”
Shan stared at the woman, not understanding the flood of emotion her words released inside him.
“I checked what Liang said about that monk in Rutok,” she declared. “There was no report of an immolation in Rutok. He lied to us, like you said. He started asking me about that dead lama, Jamyang. About whether I could find his body, about where he had been living, who his friends were.” The wind tugged out a strand of her hair. She let it hang across her face, then turned away as she felt his gaze. “Who was he, Shan? Who was that lama?”
“I don’t know. I am following his ghost to Chamdo.”
She had no reply.
“What exactly are you proposing to do?” he asked.
“I am going to pull in front of you and escort you to Chamdo. We’re going to find his ghost together.”
* * *
The journey to the northeast was much slower than Shan would have liked but after an hour, when they encountered the first roadblock, he knew they would never have had a chance without Meng. With a knob officer as an escort they were able to crawl past several groups of heavily guarded trucks. In the middle of the afternoon they were forced to stop not for another checkpoint but for a disabled truck that had broken down in the center of the road, blocking both lanes. Two dozen men in threadbare denim had been off-loaded and allowed to sit on the bank at the edge of the road.
Shan’s heart lurched as he saw the prisoners. Most were emaciated veterans of years in the gulag, wearing the dull, battered expressions of those without hope. Scattered among them was fresh meat from the east, new prisoners whose faces were tight with fear, not of the guards but of their fellow prisoners, the gaunt reflections of the creatures they would become.
Shan had wondered why so many truckloads were on the move that day, but now he saw the smaller truck behind the first, its open cargo bay piled high with shovels and picks, and stacks of the baskets used for hauling dirt and stones. There were special hard-labor mines for such prisoners, opened only in the summer, some in deep treacherous tunnels prone to cave-ins. Others would go to uranium pits where the radiation would cause every prisoner’s hair to fall out by the end of the first month. They were considered the lucky ones, for they would work in the open air and the guards tended to keep their distance for fear of contaminating themselves.
“Buddha’s breath,” Jigten gasped. “Look at the bastards. Half of them are walking skeletons.” He pulled out a cigarette and tossed it to one of the rail-thin prisoners. Another prisoner jerked forward, grabbing it out of the air. With a victorious expression he stuffed it into his mouth and ate it.
* * *
The grounds of the former monastery used by the Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute had been lavishly restored. Through the open gate at its entrance, statues of Mao and Buddha stood at either side of the courtyard, staring at each other, an elegant, newly built chorten in between. Shan and Meng, dressed in hastily acquired civilian clothes, watched from an outside table at a café across the street. Monks entered the Institute carrying books. Chinese men and women in business suits moved in and out of the gate. Tibetan townspeople passed through the gate to stand before the Buddha, sometimes draping a traditional prayer scarf over its wrist. At times the compound seemed to convey the air of a traditional monastery, at others it seemed more like a busy government office complex.
They sat in silence, finishing their tea and then accepting a new pot from the waiter. Shan found his gaze drifting toward the street traffic and the flow of urban life. A woman hurried a young girl in pigtails across the street. Two boys teased a puppy with a feather tied to a string. A Tibetan woman hawked hot noodles and momos, meat dumplings, from plastic pails covered with towels. A tall Tibetan led a donkey down the street, the black sash woven in his hair marking him as a Khampa.
“You said you had a son,” Meng suddenly said. “So you are married?”
It was part of her cover, he told himself at first. They were supposed to be a man and a woman having tea together. Then he saw the shy way she looked at him.
“No,” he replied. “Not now. Not ever I guess.”
“You guess?”
“My wife had the marriage annulled.”
“But you have a son.”
“We never spent more than two weeks together. She was in the Party, got an assignment in another city. By the time I was sent to prison she was a vice mayor. After my son was arrested as a drug dealer it was better for her to deny her connections with us.”
“So she got a divorce, you mean.”
“No. Too messy. My son and I would still be on her record. More politically expedient to get a judge in the Party to issue a decree for the records to be erased. It was as if we never existed in her life.”
“That must have been painful.”
Shan shrugged. “I was busy building roads and trying to stay alive on corncobs and sawdust gruel. It was years before I even knew.”
They sipped tea in silence, forgetting the gate for a long moment.
“Surely you…” Shan was not sure how to finish his query.
“Surely I was married? Yes,” Meng said matter-of-factly. “He studied literature and drama. He wrote very well but couldn’t find a job so he took one in a faceless building where they wrote public scripts for the government. Eulogies for Eighth Route Army veterans. Tales of worker heroes, real and otherwise. He was good at it, good at finding words to tug at the heartstrings of the proletariat. He got noticed. They promoted him. He began writing speeches for officials and news releases for the Party.”
“Propaganda.” The word slipped out before Shan could stop it.
Meng gave an awkward nod. “I didn’t like it. He didn’t like it, not at first. He drank. They kept promoting him and he kept drinking. That was the first time I was a lieutenant. When they assigned him to Beijing, they made me a captain, arranging security for officials. I begged him to quit. I said he had sold his soul, that he was better than that. He hit me.”
Shan lifted his cup and stared at her over its lip, wondering what it might have been like if he had met Meng like this, not wearing a knob uniform.