“No. Everyone here knows what those big phones look like, because every other foreigner has one.”
“And the farmer spoke with you, after taking money to keep quiet.”
“In Tibet, comrade, keeping something secret means keeping it quiet from the Chinese.”
A loud horn from the road broke the silence that followed. They looked up to see Jomo with his beloved old blue truck, his battle junk. Kypo faded into the shadows.
By the time Shan reached the truck the wiry mechanic was standing at the curb, gazing at Shan with an apologetic expression.
“Tsipon says Director Xie needs you. I am supposed to take you to him and help you.”
Shan pushed back the dark thing within him that rose at the mention of the wheelsmasher’s name. “Help me?” As Shan spoke, several Tibetans appeared from an alley on the opposite side of the street and began climbing into the cargo bay of the truck.
“The engine is unpredictable. He doesn’t want you stranded,” Jomo said plaintively, then gestured toward the half dozen Tibetans settling into the bay. “They heard we were going up the mountain.”
“Are we? Going up the mountain?”
“Xie is up there,” Jomo replied. He climbed in and with a loud cough and a cloud of smoke the old truck began to move.
It was not unusual for trucks to give rides to Tibetans, who seldom had their own vehicles, but when Jomo halted for four anxious older women near the truck stop where the road to Chomolungma left the highway, Shan turned to the mechanic. “Don’t you think I should know at least as much as they do?”
“What they know is that Religious Affairs is in the mountains,” Jomo replied in a tight voice, leaning forward as if needing all his concentration to negotiate the winding curves.
“Then tell me this,” Shan tried. “What happened between Ama Apte and your father? What prevents him from going into the mountains?”
“Before my time,” Jomo shot back.
“They avoid each other.”
“They hate each other. If my father sees me speaking with Kypo, he berates me and throws things at me like when I was a little boy. He calls her the false prophet, says everything she does is a lie, says all of Tumkot hangs on the thread of a lie.”
“Surely, Jomo, you have wondered what that lie is.”
“Before my time,” Jomo replied again, and would say no more.
Shan studied the Tibetan, doing some rough calculations.
Jomo’s time would have begun, he decided, sometime in the late 1960s.
Director Xie had his fox-fur hat pulled low against the chill wind as he waited for them at a crossroads that connected to one of the valleys defined by the long, high ridges that jutted out from the Himalayas.
“Excellent!” Xie exclaimed to Shan. “You brought laborers! Such foresight!”
Shan nodded uncertainly, then with rising foreboding complied with Xie’s gesture and climbed into the back of his government sedan.
He did not recognize their destination until they were within half a mile of it. The only other time he had seen Sarma gompa, the small monastery, had been weeks earlier, from the ridge above when he had been hiking on a pilgrim’s path. The compound of centuries-old stone and timber buildings nestled against a high, flat rock face. Sheltered to the west by tall junipers and rhododendron, it had seemed a serene oasis in the dry, windblown valley.
“We are closing in, comrade,” Xie declared. “This is the landscape of our victory,” he added with the tone of a field commander, and was rewarded with a vigorous nod from the young deputy who sat in the front seat.
Shan glanced from the bureaucrat to the gompa. What landscape? What victory? Then Xie answered his unspoken questions with an announcement that sent a shudder down his back.
“That Cao has not even found this place,” Xie said with a conspiratorial gleam. He was competing with the Public Security Bureau.
“Major Cao,” Shan ventured, “seems overly rigid.”
Xie laughed. He was enjoying his field trip immensely. “A dinosaur. Pretending he can deal with an assassination without severing the root it grew out of.”
Shan’s confusion over Xie’s intention disappeared as they pulled to a stop by the gompa, renowned in the region for its ancient murals. The faces of the Tibetans who climbed out of the truck told him everything. Some scrubbed tears from their faces, others clenched prayer beads or gaus with white knuckles. Jomo tried to scurry away as he climbed out of the cab, but Shan stepped in front of him. The mechanic slowly turned his guilt-stricken face up to Shan. He often worked at the town garage. He would have known when the dump truck, now parked near the trees, had been dispatched, would have known it was pulling a trailer carrying a compact bulldozer. Sarma was the gompa of the fugitive monks.
One of the Tibetan women uttered an anguished cry when the bulldozer roared to life, another clutched her breast as if she had been stabbed. Men in white shirts appeared by the buildings, Xie’s deputies from Lhasa. Several of the Tibetans Jomo had brought from town settled on a knoll by the front gate, folding their legs under them, pulling out their prayer beads.
The sound of the machine plowing through the gate and into the brittle old wood of the temple at the front of the gompa nearly brought Shan to his knees. Shards of painted plaster flew into the air. Splinters of wood popped and cracked over the metallic clinking of the treads as the bulldozer cut a swath from one wall to the next. The wide eye of a god that dropped onto the cage of the operator seemed to take on new expressions-shocked, then terrified-before slipping away to be crushed. The end of an old altar became trapped under one end of the blade and was dragged along until shattering into a dozen pieces. Suddenly the machine emerged from the building, massive holes now in opposite sides of the structure. The bulldozer pivoted on one tread and slammed into one of the standing corners. The building staggered, swayed violently, then collapsed. Two of Xie’s deputies clapped. Jomo fell against the front of the truck, his head buried in his arms.
Shan fought the temptation to race to the machine and seize the key from the ignition, to stand in front of the blade. But nothing he did would change the fate of the serene little gompa, which had withstood storm and strife for so many centuries, sheltered so many prayers, only to be annihilated at the whim of a bureaucrat. Eventually, through his numbness, he realized that half the Tibetans had disappeared. He recalled that the pilgrim path rose up the ridge from the shadows of the trees, past the painted rock face in the rear courtyard. Slowly, inconspicuously, he paced along the front of the compound, seeing movement in the shadows of the trail. There were storerooms in the back, the last place the bulldozer would reach. Some of the Tibetans had come to save what treasures they could.
He returned to Xie’s side and pointed to a building with a fierce demon painted on its wall at the corner farthest from the storerooms, out of sight of the trail. “The gonkhang,” Shan explained, choking his guilt. “The protector chapel should be next.”
Shan watched in silence as Xie gleefully directed the bulldozer into the sturdy little building, saw the demon crumble, the lathe and plaster of the wall burst apart, an odd wooden frame with wooden screw mounts shatter as the blade hit it. The rumble of the machine drowned out the sob that escaped Shan’s throat. He felt his knees giving way, and braced himself against Xie’s sedan. It had not been a protector chapel, it had been a barkhang, a traditional printing press. There had been one old printing press left in the region, Kypo had told him, one place where the reverently carved rosewood sutras could still be used. Shan shut his eyes as dozens of ancient printing plates, each a unique treasure, fell from shelves and were crushed under the tread of the bulldozer.
Xie’s fox-covered head bobbed up and down enthusiastically as he watched the destruction, and he called out to one of his deputies before gesturing for Shan to follow him past his limousine. Several chests had been removed from inside, and were lined up by the dump truck.