His father waited for him on the mountainside beside a small comfortable bungalow of wood and stone, completing a painting of intricately detailed bamboo in which a thrush sang. Sipping water from a wooden ladle, the old scholar looked up and gazed expectantly down the misty trail.
Shan reached into his pouch and withdrew a paper and pen.
We are journeying to your Sung house, Father, he wrote. Ko with fresh brushes and I with a basket of lychee nuts. Not long now, until we slip these chains. Keep the tea warm. Xiao Shan, he signed it. Little Shan.
Shan stared at the letter, fighting his recurring guilt over never having written to his father with the full details of his own imprisonment, for fear he would disappoint the old scholar. He lifted the pen again but instead of writing drew a small simple mandala in the margin then folded another sheet of paper as an envelope around the letter and wrote his father’s name. With overlapping sticks he built a small square tower in the fire and laid the letter on it. He watched it burn, watched the glowing ashes rise high up into an oddly gentle breeze and float toward Chomolungma.
After a long time he extracted more paper, this time addressing it with the names of the two Tibetans whose lives he cherished more than his own. He had been sending a letter every week to Gendun and Lokesh, in their hidden hermitage in Lhadrung, and now wrote without thinking, in the Tibetan script they had taught him, of the events of the past ten days, wrote of everything, explaining how first a sherpa, then an American woman, were dead and not dead, playing ongoing roles in the strangest of dramas. He had begun to believe that the mountain goddess was indeed using them, he wrote, though he could not discover her purpose. I have lost the way of finding the truth, he finally inscribed. Teach me again.
He held the letter in his hands, convinced more than ever that the old Tibetans would be aware that he was sending a message, asking them to help him discover the truth across the hundreds of miles that separated them.
But there was no truth, he could hear his friends say, at least none that could ever be spoken, there was only the particular goodness that resonated inside each man, and each man’s form of goodness was as unique as each cloud in the sky.
He sat long after he had burned the second letter, watching the fire dwindle to ashes, driving the world from his mind the way Gendun and Lokesh had taught him. Finally he went to the lip of the high ledge and folded his hands into the diamond of the mind mudra for focus, looking over the sleeping town and the snowcapped sentinels on the horizon. After an hour he found a quiet place within. After another hour he began to let each piece of evidence enter the place, turning it, twisting it, prodding it, looking for and finally finding the one little ember that was smoldering under it all.
Shan was at the entry to the Tingri County People’s Library when it opened, wearing his best clothes, respectfully greeting the Chinese matron who administered the collection, moving to a long row of shelves under the side window. It was a compact, sturdy building, freshly painted and containing a bigger collection than would seem justified by the size of the town, reflecting the largess of the local Party.
The books Shan focused on were all identically bound, all labeled in block gold ideograms Annual Report of the Tingri County Secretariat of the Communist Party of China. He picked up the volumes for the early 1960s and began quickly leafing through them. They consisted almost entirely of pronouncements from Beijing, the only local content being commentary on the evolving campaign against the local landlord class, with lists of assets, down to the number of sheep and yaks. It was a familiar saga, in which local cooperatives, formed from what Beijing termed the peasant class, gradually increased their power over the social structure.
“May I be of assistance?” came an aggrieved voice over his shoulder.
Shan turned to the librarian with a smile. “This early period of socialist assimilation fascinates me. When I was younger I spent days and days in the archives in Beijing.” That much at least was true. “Each region has its own particular version to tell.”
The woman came closer. She smelled of strong soap and peanut oil. “You are supposed to sign in to use the reference materials,” she chided, extending a clipboard.
Shan apologized and quickly wrote his name at the bottom of a list of names.
“Beijing?” she asked in a more relaxed tone.
“My home.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “I am from Tianjin! Practically neighbors.”
“Practically neighbors,” Shan agreed. He fixed the woman with a meaningful gaze. “Surely there was much drama during this region’s transformation. So remote. So close to the border. So many locals mired in the old ways. I used to go to Tianjin,” he added. “I used to watch the ships.”
The woman gave an exclamation of excitement and Shan listened patiently for several minutes as she recounted tales of walking the docks with her parents when she was a child, of an uncle who used to sail on freighters that traveled all over Asia. At last she stood, retrieved a stool, and searched the shelf over the window, producing a dusty volume that she handed to Shan with a satisfied smile. “So many just want to come in to read about yeti, or all the foreigners who have died on our mountain. And until I arrived last year the collection was so incomplete, it took me months just to understand where she had left off.”
“Left off?”
“My predecessor. Poor woman had lived here for fifteen years without ever going up to the base of Chomolungma. And the one day she finally decides to drive up her car fails her.”
Shan leaned forward. “Are you saying she died?”
The librarian’s eyes widened as she gave a melodramatic sigh. “Brakes failed; off a cliff she flew.”
“And books were missing after she died? They were here once, and were stolen?”
The woman shrugged. “Stolen, misplaced. They were part of the overall collection she had been compiling on the local history of the People’s Republic. I had to make calls to Shigatse to get these, the only ones in the county I think. I can’t imagine why the most important book of all for those interested in local history should be missing.”
The book was a limited edition, published by the Party, entitled Heroes of the Himalayan Revolution. After passing over several pages of Party platitudes, Shan reached a dry chronicle, written in a clerical style, which opened by stating that the struggle to unlock the grip of the landlord classes in the region required more resources than elsewhere-the Party’s way of acknowledging that there had been genuine resistance from the local Tibetans. He passed over pages with more lists of the landlord class, expanded as the fervor of reform spread to include not only the large landowners but smaller and smaller farms. Those who owned fifty sheep, then those who owned ten sheep. Those who owned a yak and a dog. As the reform committees, led by ranking members of the peasant class guided by Chinese, began to redistribute the wealth, “hooligans in the mountains” sought to interfere. A company of infantry was brought in. A brigade. A battalion. It was the closest an official chronicler would come to admitting there was an ongoing armed rebellion against the Chinese. Campaigns to eliminate the hooligans were launched along the border with Nepal, in the hills above Shogo, in the valleys below Tumtok village.
But real reform had not started until Mao had dispatched his youth brigades, the Red Guard. Few members of Shan’s generation would speak openly of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s euphemistic caption for the years during which the Red Guard inflicted chaos and terror on the country. Youthful zealots, often no more than teenagers, had set themselves up as de facto rulers in many regions, even taking over units of the army. Only when the Red Guard had established itself in Tibet had the systematic destruction of monasteries and temples begun.