He turned and faced the window, still speaking in a wooden voice. “They were more organized by then, with brigades and a command structure. The commander of my brigade demanded the most difficult assignment, so we could prove our love for the Great Helmsman.” Tan’s hand twitched again, flinging ash against the glass.
“Tingri County.”
Tan nodded. “It was a wilderness, a wild frontier. No maps. No real organized government. Vicious yetis and snow leopards that swallowed men whole, if you believed the stories. A reactionary with a gun behind every rock. The town was nothing like this,” he said with a gesture toward the street. “It was mostly just the monastery and a few shops. Army patrols came through sometimes, often with wounded men, sometimes with trucks stacked with the dead from an ambush. They wouldn’t stay. Our Youth Brigade scared them as much as the reactionaries did.
“We settled in, took over the main halls of the monastery. But we didn’t touch the monks, not at first. Our commander was too smart for that. If we had attacked the main monastery first the local people would have wiped us out. She knew we had to do things in stages. Destroy the small fish and the big ones have nothing to feed on, she liked to say. We moved into the ranges.” Tan paused, fidgeting with the frayed cuff of his denim shirt. “I thought you said I’d have my uniform in the end.”
Shan knew this was the only reason Tan was talking. He was certain he was going to die. “It has to be cleaned.”
Tan nodded.
“So Commander Wu began to engage the rebels,” Shan suggested.
“I don’t recall saying it was Wu.”
“I’ve seen the old records, Colonel.”
Tan shrugged. “After the first year we got more equipment, had soldiers assigned to us. No one would say no to her. She had the energy of wildcat, she was smart, she was beautiful. She made me a lieutenant, in charge of her military operations, enticed me into her bed. We would go into the mountains and make the local people dismantle their own religious buildings, every shrine, every little monastery, and organize new cooperatives, hold struggle sessions with all the senior monks and landowners, discipline anyone who resisted. We were gods, she would say to me at night when we lay together.”
Tan took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling slowly. “We were children,” he said in a whisper, then looked out the window, his gaze lingering on the figure of Major Cao, who leaned against a car on the opposite side of the street. Shan did not miss the subtle relaxation in the muscles of his jaw, the reaction he expected when Tan saw his interrogator was outside the building. “Who would have thought that she and I would come back after all these years to die here?”
“Were there foreigners in the mountains?” Shan asked.
Tan shrugged again. “Foreign equipment. There were always rumors that Americans were coming, that Americans were being diverted from Vietnam and would parachute onto every mountain. She got film footage of the war in Vietnam and made us watch it, again and again, so we would know the imperialist enemy.” He drew deeply on his cigarette, blew the smoke toward Cao outside. “I never saw any foreigners. It was bad enough with just the rebels. They were magnificent. Four Rivers, Six Ranges, they called their army. They were eagles swooping down to engage fields of crows. Disappearing into their secret mountain nests. Climbing like mountain goats. Coming out of snowstorms like ghosts. But we could always call in more troops, always shoot more Tibetans on suspicion of collaboration. An eagle might defeat the first hundred crows, and the next hundred, but when the hundreds keep coming eventually they will be picking eagle bones.”
“And you were lord of the crows.”
“Deputy lord of the crows,” Tan corrected, and lit another cigarette.
“You had a different kind of cigarette back then,” Shan observed as Tan exhaled a plume of smoke.
Tan winced. “She called it a symbol of class struggle. At one struggle session with old monks she rolled up prayers and forced them to smoke them like cigars. After a while it became something of a habit. She passed them out to everyone on the tribunals.”
“When you arrived at the hotel, she wasn’t receiving any visitors, so you found a way to make sure she knew it was you. Why did you want to see her?”
Tan shrugged. “It had been over thirty years.”
“You could have had lunch together. Instead you sent her a rolled-up peche page and met in her room.”
Tan faced the window. “She sent me a letter last year, saying she had never married, that she and I had been married to the People’s Republic. I thought she might have changed, mellowed.” He glanced back at Shan. “I seem to recall you were married once.”
“My wife started out mellow. Then she married the government.” Shan saw the beginning of one of the cold grins he had often seen on Tan’s face but it ended in a grimace.
“She had covered her lamp like some teenager. There was a bottle of wine. She always expected tribute. In the last year of the brigade she started demanded payment from villagers to spare their homes from destruction.” Tan shrugged again. “As soon as I saw her, she began rattling off statistics, of the number of employees she had in her ministry, her budget, the foreign exchange earnings her work brought in. She began drinking, urging me to join her. I told her I needed to go. She unbuttoned her blouse. She said we should play like the old days, like we had learned to do in this very town. I told her I was tired from the long drive. That’s when she took my pistol, to play with. She used to carry one of those heavy American pistols we captured from the rebels, using it as a gavel at the tribunals, and for executions when the Hammer and Lightning Brigade took prisoners. She put it under her pillow and said I would have to come back for it the next night when I was rested.”
Tan paused and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “Why did he do that, that monk in the cell? Why would he leap out to take the blow meant for me?”
“It was his way of acknowledging the truth. He knew you didn’t deserve it. And he doubted if you could take many more blows.”
Tan shook his head. “The fool.”
“What happened in the end?” Shan asked after a long silence. “How were the rebels finally beaten?”
Tan turned back toward the window, his face clouding. “Damn you! What are you doing to me? I don’t talk like this to people.”
“We used to talk about death all the time in prison, not with fear but with curiosity. It was among us all the time, it was like an old companion. A herder in our barracks told us that when a man senses death getting close a door opens inside his spirit and releases the most interesting surprises, that old forgotten truths will find their way out. When he lay dying, he kept talking about a white yak he had seen as a boy, said that he could see it flying down from a cloud to take him away. He had half the barracks watching the sky, trying to spot it.”
Tan watched Major Cao, who paced along the sidewalk. Cao began yelling at a Tibetan boy approaching on a bicycle, ordering him into the street. When the confused boy did not comply Cao kicked the bike as it passed, catapulting the boy over the handlebars, smashing the bike into a light pole. The boy pulled himself up, glanced at Cao with terror in his eyes and ran into the night.