“I am the manager of the hotel, it is our pleasant to meet you. I hear you wish to see Balagezong.”
“Yes. As soon as possible.”
“But this is a very, very difficult place to reach. Why don’t you visit Bitahai Lake instead? Jade Dragon Mountains? We have the black-necked cranes here, it is the season.”
“We want to go to Balagezong.”
“But, but it is too difficult.” His smile was bright and determined. “You must need a guide, and such tremendous luck with the weather. I do not know if you can be doing this. It is so far, it is past the heaven villages. Instead you visit the rhododendrons, or day trip to Dali! See Tibetan dancing.”
“We want to go to Balagezong.”
The manager sighed. He shook his head and a faint hint of a scowl crossed his face. Then he tutted.
“So. I will help.” He snapped fingers at a bellboy. “You go to the Lijiang Teahouse — take taxi from here past old town square. Ask for a young man, Tashi. Xie Xie. My boy will help you.” His smile faded and then it was gone. The manager disappeared.
The sun was harsh on the street, so bright it was a painful process to open an eye; simply seeing was painful. Jake put on his sunglasses. Julia did the same. But everything was painful, not just the sun. Walking was painful. The blood in Jake’s veins was pumping; he wheezed. He thought Julia looked unwell. Should he allow her to take these risks? Did he have the right to stop her?
“Come on,” she said as the bellboy waved down a taxi. “Every minute — remember? Every minute matters.”
Jake wasn’t sure he could get used to this: the altitude was like some slow but insidious constriction around his brain, heart, and muscles, as if he were being medievally tortured from the inside, with thumbscrews and gyves. But then he thought of Chemda being dissected and altered on a slab, and he hurried to the cab.
The old town of Zhongdian was a mazy parade of decrepit houses and Yi tribal shops and squawking scarlet parrots outside Tang dynasty pavilions abutting rackety flagstoned plazas, where Naxi women grilled yak-meat kebabs on open braziers; the sun was so bright it made the very darkest shadows even darker — and there in the shadows, by the Lijiang Teahouse, they found Tashi. He was a young Tibetan in jeans, with a rough leather jacket and a plausible manner and dazzling white teeth.
“It will be great difficult, rough, two days, maybe, but I have car. Very, very danger, two hundred dollars. We go now?”
Jake and Julia swapped a glance. Jake took out some more bills. Four hundred dollars.
“Keep us alive. Get us there. Fast.”
Tashi smiled widely.
“We go now.”
An urgent walk down a cobbled road took them past the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party. The big red flag fluttered halfheartedly. Jake stared. Swastikas were inscribed on an ancient Buddhist doorway. Sun symbols. The car was muddy and robust: an old Japanese pickup. They climbed in and rattled out of the last straggles of Zhongdian.
“How long to Balagezong?” said Jake.
“Ten hours. Maybe more. We sleep in house. On way.”
The vastness of the Tibetan plateau engulfed the speeding car. They passed herds of cudding yak and indolent dzo, yak-and-cow crossbreeds. They saw newly built Naxi farmhouses of unseasoned wood, and gatherings of villagers in purple-and-red headscarves sitting in yards under the Chinese Communist flag. Black-necked cranes shimmered off the alpine lakes, flocks of wistful and fragile beauty wintering from the colds of Siberia.
Tashi was laughing as he drove, telling them what he felt about the Chinese.
“Sometimes, before, I get angry about the Chinese, what they do to Tibetans. So now I say fuck the Chinese. And that is what I do. I fuck the Chinese, I fuck Chinese girls in the discos.” He laughed. Then he said, “Why you wan’ go to Balagezong? You are in trouble? No one ever want to go there, not tourist, not Chinese, not Tibetan.”
Jake stayed dumb.
Tashi shrugged and laughed and said, “I do not care. No p’oblem. I used to sleep on a snooker table. I help you. Police arrest me many time, drink, fight!”
Children ran out to stare at the car as they passed through a ramshackle village: children in sheepskins and leather skirts. Then the houses dwindled and some higher brown slopes showed cataracts of snowmelt. The confusion of seasons was unnerving. Spring and winter and summer in one place at one time. The road skirted a blue mineral lake surrounded by an eerie forest draped with green moss.
Then, at last, as the sun died behind the summits, Tashi pulled off the rubbly road into the forecourt of a huge, old wooden Tibetan house, in an entirely electricity-less village, where an old snaggle-toothed crone smiled at the door. This is where they would sleep. They climbed steps above a barn of stored barley and steaming livestock, into the house itself.
A pungent fire of fresh-chopped wood burned beneath a cauldron in the center of the shadowy darkness. Pieces of flattened pig face and racks of yak trotter hung drying from the eaves. Jake saw a portrait of Mao on a poster on one wall. On the opposite wall was a large photo of the Dalai Lama. Thangkas — Buddhist paintings — hung behind protective screens of rippling silk curtains.
Mao stared at him. The Dalai Lama stared at him. The cured flat pig faces hanging from the eaves stared curiously at him with their squashed brown cheeks and lashy little eyes, like the face of someone run over in a cartoon. Jake struggled not to think, obscenely, and upsettingly, of his sister. Why were these thoughts bombarding him? It was surely the witch, the krasue, unnerving him. From afar. But if he was bewitched, he was going to fight it. He had to fight, for Chemda.
Even as he sat here, she could be on the slab, her brain vivisected.
Tashi said, “You are hungry?”
“Yes.”
“The old woman, she is friend of my aunt. She will feed us.”
The request was passed to the woman, who nodded and called in turn to some ponytailed granddaughters, who emerged like petite and nubile genies from the intense darkness. Food was served. The house was filling with Tibetans. The whole family was eating walnuts and boiled broad beans and yak chops and oily cubes of rancid pork fat in sesame.
Tashi wiped his greasy hands on his leather jacket, then said, “OK, I ask about this place. Balagezong.”
He spoke with the woman. She nodded. Then she looked at Jake and Julia and shook her head. An angry sadness lurked in her dark expression.
Tashi explained: “She says it is very bad place? She says do not go. Men with scars live there, dead men live there, I not know what this mean.”
“What?”
“She says death is there. Much death there. Scarred men, ghost there. They live in heaven village. She say do not go.” He repeated her words. “Do not go to heaven villages. Because you will not come back.”
37
The heaven villages: unnerving images floated into Jake’s head. He resisted them; sourcing his resolve. Focusing on Chemda. He wanted information.
“How far is it? Balagezong?”
Tashi sighed. “A few more hours only. But a dangerous road. Now we sleep. Maybe tomorrow you feel different and go home. I hope so.”
“I will not. I will not feel different. We have to leave early.”
The Tibetan man shrugged and smiled a lopsided smile.