There was a mountain before him, and on the mountain was a squirrel and on the squirrel was a flea and on the flea was an eye that watched the sky, the flea wishing for wings. Shan kept his focus high, on the horizon. The mountain was there, but the rest was in his mind's eye only, his way of keeping distracted as the truck moved to the end of a long flat valley tucked into the north slope of the Kunlun. He shifted his gaze from the horizon to the floor of the truck, not daring to look at the huge barbed wire compound they approached.
He knew he had to speak to Lau's driver, Wangtu and any other of Xu's recent detainees Jakli might find. But as they had driven into the arid valley that contained Glory Camp, the black shapeless thing- his legacy of the gulag- had crawled into his gut again, and he had fought a sudden urge to leap out of the truck. No, it's only a reeducation camp, he told himself, not one of the gulag prisons where they trained you with electric shock and ball peen hammers, where misfits like Shan were sent to have their souls splintered and their bodies battered. Not a real prison. Only a reeducation camp, he told himself again as they approached the mile-long row of barbed wire that defined the front of the compound. But when he looked down he saw that his hands were shaking. He placed his right hand over his left forearm and squeezed, trying to control the reaction. Then he noticed the spot his hand covered and squeezed even tighter.
"Are you in pain?" Jakli inquired, with a motion of her hand that caused Fat Mao to slow the truck.
No, Shan was tempted to say, I am not in pain, I am in weakness. If he were caught and they checked the tattoo numbers, they would classify him as an escapee. What had Jowa said to Gendun? They would simply take Shan behind a rock and shoot him. He felt as though at any moment he would lose control of his body and it would fling itself out of the truck. But he just stared at the floor. On the floor was a pebble and on the pebble was a lichen and in the lichen lived a mite.
Jakli had driven from Lau's cabin to a small compound of windblown structures on the Kashgar highway consisting of a shed with a bank of gas pumps outside it, a larger garage building surrounded by vehicles in various states of disrepair, and, on the opposite side of the road, a square cinder block structure, painted yellow, with a large glass window and a hand-lettered sign that said only Tea. She made a series of phone calls from a phone by the gas pumps, and an hour later a delivery truck en route to Glory Camp had stopped for them. Three men were inside, Fat Mao at the wheel and two Kazakhs with heavy moustaches whom Shan recognized as Akzu's sons. The Kazakhs had climbed out onto the burlap sacks in the back of the heavy open bay vehicle to make room for Jakli and Shan in the cab. A fourth man had climbed down from the sacks, a sullen, broad-shouldered man with cold eyes and a gutter of scar tissue on his neck that could only have been made by a bullet. Jakli had introduced him as Ox Mao. Ox Mao had silently climbed into the turtle truck and driven away with Jowa, Lokesh, and Bajys.
Jakli silently placed her hand on Shan's white knuckles, then slowly pried his fingers and moved his hand away. She rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and traced the tattooed string of numbers with her finger. "I have other friends who survived the gulag," she said with a sigh. "But they always show it on their faces. I have never seen it on your face. You did well."
"No one does well," Shan whispered, looking at the tattoo. Four guards had held him down when he had resisted the ink needle. Finally they had lost patience and held his nose and mouth until he fell unconscious. When he had awakened, the numbers had been completed, and a political officer had been standing over him, gloating. "Wear it proudly," the officer had barked, "it proves the state still cares about you."
Jakli spoke in her Turkic tongue and Fat Mao reached under the seat, then handed her a small medical kit. She extracted a large adhesive bandage, peeled away the backing, and placed it over the tattoo. "There," she said, and rolled down his sleeve. "Just like us now."
Strangely, the coldness began to recede. He recalled her words. Other friends, she had said. As if Shan were a friend too.
The single guard at the small hut by the gate recognized the truck and began to open the gate before they reached the outer wire. They coasted through without stopping, slowing enough for Fat Mao to toss the soldier an apple. A faded banner, frayed at the edges, hung between two posts. Become Liberated from Feudalism.
Shan's prisoner-eyes took over for a moment. The gate was not well maintained, its hinges loose and rusty. Much of the wire in both the gate and the perimeter fence also appeared rusted. The guard himself was overweight and middle-aged, not one of the crack People's Liberation Army or Public Security troops that controlled hard larbor prisons, and his carbine looked older than the guard himself.
Wangtu would be on trusty duties, Fat Mao explained, since he was only being held for questioning, which meant he would be excused from camp routine to unload the weekly food delivery at the camp warehouse. Jakli pointed to the warehouse, a big square building between the perimeter fence and the inner wire that contained the prisoner barracks. They drove slowly toward the structure, past the low L-shaped building that housed the administrative offices for Glory to the People Camp. Several men in brown shirts and pants stood on the steps of the office building, watching their truck. He had not seen the men before, but he had seen the brown clothing, in the mountains before Gendun had disappeared.
"Brigade security," Jakli explained. "A small garrison of soldiers remain, but last year the Brigade assumed responsibility for administration of the camp."
Beyond the warehouse Shan saw a huge pile of coal and a small boiler building, marked by a fifty-foot-high smokestack. There were gulag prisons in Xinjiang, Shan knew, that were giant coal mines, where men and women led brutal lives extracting coal with hammer and chisel, providing coal to sister prison facilities and shipping the remainder to eastern cities.
Past the boiler was a cemetery.
After he climbed out, Shan looked back at the long rows of sun-bleached planks that served as markers, with the odd realization that he had not seen a cemetery for years. In Beijing land was too scarce to waste on the dead. Only the most important Party members or the wealthy were granted permanent graves. Others could pay for the right to be interred for a few years, to allow family a chance to visit, but when the contract expired the bodies were dug up and burned. The Buddhists he had known in Tibet still practiced sky burial, leaving the dead for the vultures, the quickest way to return the body to the circle of life.
Suddenly a harsh voice erupted from the loudspeakers arrayed on poles around the compound, announcing in Mandarin that Sessions in Praise of Party Heroes would commence in ten minutes. Shan surveyed the compound inside the inner wire fence as it came to life. Barracks- most constructed of cement block with tin roofs, others of plywood whose layers were peeling away- lined three sides of a square nearly a third of a mile on each side. The U-shape they formed opened at the front, toward the administrative complex where the truck now sat. At a second, inner gate that led to the barracks two more guards could be seen, one leaning against a post as if asleep. One of the buildings, the nearest to the inner gate, had heavy wire covering its windows and four guards sitting on a bench by its door. Shan studied it closely, suddenly aware that Gendun could be inside.
Past the barracks, at the end of the inner compound, Shan could see fields, empty except for one large plot with scores of cabbages. Beyond the wire to the south and east were brown, grass-covered hills on which scattered sheep grazed.
With painful memories he watched as hundreds of grey-clothed prisoners scurried toward their assigned political education classes. No one could be late. A lao jiao inmate did not suffer the deprivations of the gulag prisoner, but discipline was still strict. Shan's eyes drifted back toward the cemetery and studied the long rows of markers. Lao jiao prisoners were typically short-termers, sentenced to a few months or a year. That should mean that few would die during their term.
"They contract contagious diseases sometimes," Jakli said as she followed his gaze. "And two years ago there was a drought. People in the towns got the priority allocation of food. Next in priority were the agricultural enterprises, then the livestock. Then came the prisoners. Older prisoners died of malnutrition. They ate their belts, they ate their shoes, they ate bugs and worms. But they died anyway," she sighed. "And the Brigade sends lao gai prisoners who are too ill to work, just sends them here to die. They hate having underproductive workers lying around the coal mines. Sometimes," she added, "the boot squads bring special prisoners here, because it is so far from anywhere, so secret."
The truck backed toward a large plank building with a loading dock. As it stopped a figure wearing a white shirt and tie emerged from the administrative building and waved a clipboard at them. Jakli gestured Shan toward the cargo bay.
They had agreed in advance that Shan would push the sacks from the top, the position least visible to the guards, handing the sacks to the others until Jakli found a way to take Wangtu aside. PRODUCT OF GUANGDONG PROVINCE, Shan read on the burlap bags as he climbed to the top. It was another of Beijing's cruel jokes. The Tibetans and the Kazakhs, as well as the many other minorities of the western reaches, traditionally ate barley and wheat as their staples. But Beijing arranged for much of the local grain production to be shipped east for livestock feed and exchanged for rice, the staple of the Han Chinese. Explanatory tracts, written by the central government, were distributed among the local populations to demonstrate that rice was healthier. Rice, some even claimed, was what made the Han people smarter than others. An American acquaintance in Beijing had once laughed at Shan for being upset at a poster saying that Rice was the Food of Patriots. Just a marketing slogan, he had said.
From his perch on top of the rice bags Shan surveyed the camp again. He could see the graveyard clearly now, including several mounds of fresh dirt at the far end, and quickly calculated that it contained at least two hundred markers. A new building came into view- a shed for tools, perhaps- located between the boilerhouse and the cemetery. A movement at the side of the shed caught his eyes. As he watched, a figure stepped into view at the corner of the building, and the chill returned to his spine. The figure was a soldier but not one of the lazy, ill-equipped guards that stood at the wire. Even from over fifty yards away Shan recognized the uniform and the swagger. The man was from Public Security, a knob, and the weapon cradled in his arm was not an outdated rifle but a compact submachine gun.
"Are you ill?" Jakli called out for the second time that day, and he realized he had flattened himself against the sacks. Prisoner instincts died hard. "We must move," she explained as he rose and shook his head. She stretched out an arm to help him down from the truck.
Back in the cab of the truck Shan's fingers wove themselves into a mudra, his hands clasped together with the middle fingers pointing upward. Diamond of the Mind. Clarity of purpose. Remember your goal. Preserve mindfulness. He looked up from his hands just as the truck passed through the inner wire.
"I thought you meant we would leave!" he gasped.
"The loading dock is closed today," Jakli said as she looked back at the dock with a puzzled expression. "We have to unload half directly at the kitchens, then the other half tomorrow morning at the dock. We'll find Wangtu," she assured him, "one place or the other."
But in that moment Shan was not worried about finding Lau's driver. His tongue was so dry that he couldn't speak, or he might have shouted in protest. He was being taken back into prison after all. Had it all been some dreadful trick of his former jailers, to ensnare him behind government wire for a few more years?
Jakli placed her hand over his forearm again. "What were we to do? It would be more suspicious if we refused. You will be safe, I promise."
He realized he was sliding down in the seat, as if his body had willed itself to hide. He was being taken back into prison, and this time there would be no Buddhist monks to heal him when the jailers had finished with him.
A squeeze from Jakli's hand brought him back to reality. "It's only when you act like a prisoner that you become one," she observed in a calm, sober voice.
Her wisdom struck him like a fresh, cool wind, and it shamed him. He slowly sat up in the seat and said no more until they approached the long building at the base of the compound that served as kitchen and mess hall.
"I'm sorry," he said, fighting the temptation to again hold his tattoo.
Saying the words out loud somehow gave him strength but also heightened his shame. There is nothing to fear behind the wires. The words came back to him as starkly as when they had been spoken to him years earlier by a serene old monk serving his thirty-fifth year in the gulag. For no jailer who ever lived can imprison the truth.
He stepped out and stared at the first of the barracks, the special detention barracks, two hundred yards away. "Do they bring those prisoners out for exercise?" he asked Jakli.
"No. People here call them the invisibles," she said with a sigh. "Special cases. Usually nothing to do with Yoktian."
Shan stared intensely at the building, as though willing himself to see inside its walls.
"Your lama," Jakli said with sudden realization. "You think he's inside." She stared with him for a moment, then pulled his sleeve. "It's dangerous to appear too curious," she warned.
Shan fought a new urge, a compulsion to run to the sealed barracks and pound on the door, calling for Gendun. For a moment nothing seemed more important than hearing the sound of the lama's voice.
A door opened at the side of the mess hall and several men wearing loose-fitting grey tunics emerged. Jakli leapt out and disappeared into the building. Shan looked around the compound, nearly empty again now that the prisoners had joined their classes, then climbed down and joined the line of men forming to carry sacks of rice into the kitchen. He gazed at the barracks with the wire windows, futilely looking for any sign of who might be inside, then accepted one of the heavy bags and followed the line through the door, dropping it onto a stack under the supervision of a cackling woman in a brown dress who waved a wooden spoon with an air of authority. A tall man with a scar on his cheek stood at a sink, washing pots. He was doing so with only one hand. Shan stepped closer and discovered the reason. The man was chanting under his breath. His second hand was at his belt, counting a string of yellow plastic rosary beads. Another man, older than the first, stood beside him, drying the pots, though he seemed to be having trouble handling them. He was balancing each one on his palm to dry them, then placing them on a wall shelf by clamping them with his middle fingers. His thumbs were missing. Another Tibetan. Shan had seen it before. Not a week had gone by during his imprisonment when he had not heard guards cruelly joke about Tibetans being pruned. For several years it had been one of the favorite forms of punishment by certain knob officers, who used tree pruners to clip off the thumbs of monks to keep them from their rosaries.
Shan looked out through a set of double doors over the long rows of empty plank tables. One of the political classes had convened at the far end of the mess hall. A large Han woman in another brown dress was pacing inside the seated circle of prisoners, her hands clasped behind her. For one brief moment she faced the double door and Shan heard her call out, so loudly that for a chilling moment Shan thought she was addressing him.
"Who is the great provider of the people?" she asked in a shrill voice.
"The Party is the great provider of the people," the prisoners responded in chorus. It had a familiar, singsong ring to it. A mantra for the Chairman.
Shan looked from the hall back to the Tibetan at the sink, who seemed unaware of the activity around him as he offered up his own silent chant. A mantra for the Compassionate Buddha.
Outside, as Shan accepted another sack off the truck and moved back toward the building, a voice from behind him repeated the slogan the instructor had chanted. But then Shan realized the words were changing each time the man repeated the chant.
"Who is the great shoemaker of the people?" the man sang. "The Party is the great shoemaker of the people." His voice was soft, but loud enough for the men around him to enjoy his performance. "Who is the great barber of the people? The Party is the great barber of the people." Some of the men laughed. Others looked about nervously to see who else might hear.
Shan had to pause at the small flight of stairs leading to the door to wait for the older man in front of him, who seemed to be having difficulty carrying the bag up the stairs. He looked back at the man who was mocking the political instruction. A tall, large-boned man with a thick, well-groomed moustache and a sour smile returned Shan's stare. "Who is the great zookeeper of the people?" the man asked, nodding toward Shan. Shan said nothing. The man repeated the question.
Shan nodded back without shifting his gaze from the man's taunting eyes. "The Party is the great zookeeper of the people," Shan replied quietly.
The man's smile broadened and Shan saw that he was looking past Shan's shoulder to Jakli, who had appeared at the top of the short flight of stairs. "Allah be praised," he gasped under his breath. Jakli nodded and gestured them toward the shadow on the far side of the truck.
"So you've met," she said as she joined them.
"Not exactly," Shan said.
"Wangtu," Jakli said, touching the man on the arm as she spoke. "This is Shan. He came about Lau and the children."
But Wangtu seemed to have forgotten Shan. He looked at Jakli's fingers, still resting on his arm. "I thought you were gone," he said, the self-assurance suddenly gone from his voice. "They said the Jade Bitch had it in for you." He glanced at the supply truck. "You're free? You're out?"
"Mostly," she said and explained why Shan was there.
Wangtu shrugged. "Don't know about children," he said in an earnest tone, as if children didn't inhabit his world. While he studied Shan he worked his tongue against his cheek, as though searching for something in his mouth. "When boys die, that's for their parents."
"These had no parents," Jakli threw back in an impatient voice. "Lau's orphans. One lived with Bajys. You know Bajys."
"I could get you things," Wangtu said to Jakli. "I could come see you. I live in town."
"You live in Glory Camp right now."
"This?" Wangtu said with a dismissive wave of his hand toward the barracks. "Vacation. Sing a few songs, see some old friends." With these last words he sobered and gave Jakli a meaningful stare.
"How did you know Bajys?" Shan asked.
Wangtu sighed. "He and that boy, they help bring wool to town sometimes. For this clan or that clan. You know, they stay with different clans. A few weeks here, a few there. That was Lau's system. I see people, at different places. When the Brigade doesn't use me for the school, I drive trucks for the wool processing plant. They clean it and bale it and I drive it to the carpet factories in Kotian," he explained, referring to the large city over a hundred miles to the west that had once been a Silk Road trading center.
Shan looked back at Jakli. "The school is run by the Brigade?"
"The school, this camp, soon the whole world," Wangtu said in a thin voice.
"But you told him something," Jakli pressed. "You told Bajys that Lau was in trouble."
"Your father," Wangtu asked. "Did he ever come back?"
The question seemed to catch Jakli off guard. She didn't return his gaze but looked to Shan. "Wangtu and I," she explained, "we went to school together."
Wangtu grinned, as if grateful for the acknowledgment.
Jakli glanced at the truck, which was being rapidly unloaded. "Quickly, Wangtu. Why did you warn Bajys?"
The Kazakh studied the compound as if trying to remember. "I didn't, exactly. I just told him Lau was walking with the blue wolf." He cut his eyes toward Jakli as he spoke.
The announcement brought a hard glare to Jakli's face. "A jinni," she explained to Shan, as she kept her eyes on Wangtu. "A blue wolf is a very bad type of jinni. An evil spirit."
"For Kazakhs," Wangtu added. "For old Kazakhs, anyway."
"Tell us," Jakli said impatiently. "Why would you say a blue wolf shadowed her?"
Wangtu seemed not to be listening. He was looking over her shoulder. "I could get you that," he said with a wistful nod toward the wire.
Jakli turned and froze. Pleasure flashed across her face. In a rope pen between the inner and outer fences was a magnificent white horse.
"We used to walk together, Jakli," Wangtu said with an odd melancholy in his voice. "I sang songs at your camp."
The woman seemed not to have heard. She took a step forward, as though drawn by the graceful animal that pranced about the makeshift pen.
"I could get white horses for your clan," Wangtu suggested.
"Why did you say it to Bajys?" Shan pressed. Jakli broke from her trance and stepped behind Shan, as if Wangtu's offer of the white horse somehow scared her.
Wangtu sighed. "I hear things, okay? I heard a new teacher was coming. I heard Lieutenant Sui in the back one day, telling the head of the school that Lau had been reported by another teacher, who said that at one of her classes Lau read off a list of names from the five twenty-ninth, and later from 1997."
"Dissidents," Jakli offered quickly to Shan, and glanced at the truck. "But she wasn't arrested. She was murdered."
Wangtu snorted and opened his mouth as though about to laugh. "Murdered? No. Disappeared, near the river. She could still come back."
"Disappeared with a bullet in her head," Shan said. "We've seen her body."
Wangtu looked at Jakli, who confirmed Shan's words with a nod. He grimaced, then studied Shan with suspicion on his face. "Who sent you?" he asked Shan.
"Priests," Jakli said quickly, as if worried that Shan might speak first. "Priests said he should come."
"Priests? Priests?" It was Wangtu's turn to be confused. "You mean a mullah?"
"It doesn't matter," Jakli said, impatience back in her voice. "There are no bad priests."
"Sure there are. The priests that run this camp." Wangtu's voice was hollow now, and his eyes flared. "What was it the Chairman said? Religion poisons the people. So he got rid of the other religions and sent out his own priests." He looked back at Shan. "All the prosecutor says is that Lau disappeared. She spoke to us, all the ones detained. She said maybe reactionaries did something to Lau, maybe kidnapped her. They do that sometimes, she told us, hoping to trade for one of their own in prison. Maybe one of us would think of something helpful, she said."
"I saw Lau," Jakli said coolly. "She's dead, Wangtu, but the prosecutor mustn't know. It won't help anyone."
A low whistle came from between Wangtu's teeth, and he shook his head slowly. "I liked Lau." The Kazakh's eyes drifted toward the old man who had struggled on the steps. He was leaning against the wall by the door, gasping for breath.
Shan studied the man on the steps. "He's old for a rice camp," he observed. The people's reeducation resources were seldom wasted on those who had little left to contribute to the proletarian effort.
Wangtu frowned at Shan, as if perhaps Shan, or all Hans, were responsible for the man being there. "He's a teacher. Forty years in a village near Kashgar, then they put him out, told him to go to some rest home built for pensioned teachers. Instead he started unofficial classes among the clans, riding from camp to camp, taking payment in food and a pallet. Got reported for teaching ancient history."
"Ancient history?" Shan asked.
"You know, before 1949. The Republic of East Turkistan, the kingdoms of the Silk Road. When this land was independent. I tell him he's got to stop. I tell him he's too old. He's on his third bowl."
"Third bowl?" Shan asked.
Wangtu cast a surprised glance at Jakli as he spoke. "Third lao jiao term. Each time you arrive at the camp they give you a tin bowl, for washing, for eating, drinking, everything." His eyes drifted back to the oldman on the step. "After three bowls, it's hard labor if you're picked up again."
Shan looked back at the old teacher. "He wouldn't last a month in the gulag," Shan said.
Wangtu's feet shifted, and his eyes slowly surveyed the length of the wire along the side of the compound. A small vehicle, looking like an ancient armored car that might have been used in the original Eighth Route Army, drove slowly along the wire. "He won't last a month at Glory Camp, not this time. Life's cheap here since the Brigade started running the camp." He didn't seem to be speaking to them anymore but to someone else toward the office compound. Shan followed his gaze. He was looking at the cemetery.
"A Mongol," Wangtu said, "just a teenager, had a magazine with color pictures of horses. Against the rules, but so what? Just horses. Every day he'd look at the pictures and say he was going to have a herd of horses someday. At a class the instructor for his barracks pulled the Mongol's magazine from the back of his pants, where he hid it during the day. This instructor, she said the barracks needed it because the latrine had no more paper. When the Mongol leapt at him the instructor hit him in the head with a shovel. It made a crunching sound, like stepping on a rotten log. The boy sat on the ground with his head in his hands and the instructor circled around him and gave a speech on the evils of hoarding property. When she finished she yelled at the Mongol to apologize to everyone. He wouldn't reply, so she kicked him. He just rolled over. He was paralyzed. He just lies on his bunk now. The instructor took his magazine to the latrine."
Jakli put her hand to her mouth as if to hold back a sob.
Wangtu winced, as though reproaching himself for upsetting Jakli.
"But why would you warn Bajys?" Shan asked. "Why did you suspect trouble would come to Lau? Who was the evil spirit with Lau?"
"We were friends, Lau and me. She was the only one who ever sat in the front of the car with me. She used to bring me medicines, and she gave me special teas from herbs she found in the mountains." Wangtu pointed for Jakli to look back at the white horse, as if it might comfort her. "Things were happening to her. Fired from the Ag Council. The report to Public Security." Jakli turned away now, looking at the faces of the other prisoners. "That Tibetan," he continued, to her back. "I told her about that Tibetan."
Jakli spun about.
"Kaju. I didn't know his name then, but I told her, maybe three months ago, about the Tibetan Director Ko was bringing for the zheli. She didn't know. I told her I heard Ko talking in a car one day, I said to her I guess they think you're leaving."
Three months ago, Shan remembered, was when Lau had begun explaining where she wanted her body taken. "What did Lau say?" Shan asked.
"She just smiled at first and patted my arm. Then she said yes I guess they do, and she sighed and said she never should have gone to Urumqi. She always talked with me, but that day she was just quiet until the end of the trip."
"Gone to Urumqi?" Shan asked. "What did she mean?"
"I never knew," Wangtu shrugged. "Some trip to the capital."
"What else did she say?" Jakli asked.
"When she left that day she said maybe she shouldn't bring me teas anymore, that later people would say we were friends because of it. She said we could still be friends in our hearts but that she wouldn't want me hurt because of it. I said I don't care what they say, and she said you have to care, because this is China." Wangtu looked back at the white horse with a pained expression. "After that she always seemed to be in a hurry, no time to talk. I didn't drive her much afterward. Haven't seen her for a month." He shifted his gaze toward the horizon with a thoughtful expression. "Where she died, who was there?"
"That's what we want to find out." Jakli said.
"No. I mean, who did she go see? It's important. Lau, she had only certain people she trusted. She would only stay where one was close. She moved from one to the other, like from one oasis to another. Where she went, you should ask them there."
Shan and Jakli exchanged a glance. Lau had died in the place in the desert which Jakli seemed unwilling to speak about, the place where Bajys had his nightmare vision of dismembered humans.
"The prosecutor," Jakli said. "The prosector doesn't know," she reminded him.
"All I know," Wangtu said with a forced grin, "is that she didn't know how to swim." He cast a hopeful glance toward Jakli. "I wouldn't tell all this to anyone. But I did to you, Jakli."
Jakli looked at him in obvious discomfort. "I am getting married, Wangtu," she announced quickly, then leaned forward, kissed his cheek, and stepped away toward another prisoner she seemed to have recognized.
Married. Shan gazed after Jakli, feeling foolish for not having understood before. The hushed, excited conversations at Red Stone camp. The dress being whisked away by the older women. Malik's secret gift for Jakli and someone else, whose name the boy was reluctant to speak. Nikki, the name Akzu had mentioned when parting from her at the garage. Other women would have joyously shared the news. But Jakli's marriage was wrapped in secrecy. Shan understood, for he too had grown up in a world where you said the least about the things that were most important to you, for fear that they would be taken away.
Wangtu stood, crestfallen, as he watched Jakli begin talking with a short plump Han man. "You have to keep her out," he said, then repeated the words more urgently, as if Shan might not have heard.
"Out?" Shan asked. Shan looked at her again. What an odd time to be getting married, when the clans were being disbanded, and children were being killed. But Shan had learned years ago how difficult it was to translate the language of another's heart.
"Out of Glory Camp. Out of prison. Some of the guards hate her because she talks back to them, because she resists. She's not made for a cage. Like the Mongol boy." His disappointment seemed to have turned to worry. His mouth opened again but no words came out. He looked to Shan and then to the ground. "I would have done her time for her if I could," he said quietly. "She belongs in the mountains, on a horse." Then he drifted away, as if he had forgotten Shan stood there.
"Comrade Hu," Jakli said as she brought the short Han toward Shan. "Chairman of the Educational Committee for the school in Yoktian."
Hu touched his thick-rimmed glasses and gave a shallow smile. "Former Chairman, I guess," he said.
"Not necessarily," Jakli said reassuringly. "It's just Prosecutor Xu's way, to intimidate witnesses."
"I told her," Hu said. "I witnessed nothing. Lau was not on our official staff. We had no official responsibility for her. Once she received a small stipend but that stopped years ago. We just gave her an office, let her know our schedules so she could coordinate. Let her use our drivers sometimes."
"So you spoke to Xu already?"
"This morning. She told me to think about it, after I said I knew nothing. Good jobs are hard to find in Yoktian, she reminded me. She looked at my file and reminded me that I have a family. I told her there were no secrets about Lau. She was an open book. Maybe too open. That's all it was, she was too blunt with the wrong person. Some of the herders have tempers, some still have one foot in the age of the khans, when there were blood feuds." He looked over the prison grounds. "I offered to instruct classes while I was here," he declared, as if he suspected Shan might be a political officer.
Shan's attention drifted away. Comrade Hu, he had quickly decided, was not the type that Lau would have confided in.
He sensed that Wangtu was right, that Lau was someone with great intuition about people, who moved from one she trusted to another she trusted. But what did she leave with them? Secrets. Secrets are what you give to those you trust. She had gone to the place in the desert, to the place called Karachuk, not to die but to share a secret.
He noticed another man, sitting in the shadows against the wall of the mess hall, facing the open yard of the camp but casting occasional glances toward Shan and Jakli. He was nearly bald and had so little flesh on his face that the contours of his skull were unmistakable.
His eyes made momentary contact with Shan's, and as they did so his eyelids seemed to droop and his fingertips touched the ground, as though the man had grown sleepy.
"A waste of time," Jakli declared as she followed Shan's gaze. "Go ahead," she said with a shrug, "but you'll make no sense out of what he says."
Shan cast her a puzzled glance as she continued to speak with Hu.
"The Xibo," she said in an aside to Shan. "The waterkeeper."
"What's his name?"
"I don't know. He's always just the waterkeeper. He just mutters nonsense and drools. He speaks only the tongue of the clans and the old Xibo words."
Confirming that Jakli remained occupied with Hu, he stepped toward the bald man.
The waterkeeper gave no acknowledgment when Shan squatted in front of him. He just shuffled sideways, as if Shan had blocked his view. Shan matched his movement, then sat on the ground. The two men said nothing. Shan stared at the waterkeeper. The man stared over Shan's shoulder as if not noticing him, sucking something, perhaps the shell of a nut, or a pebble. A thin line of drool hung from the corner of his mouth.
Shan had spent his childhood in Manchuria. He had known Xibos, and the man in front of him was no Xibo. Nor was he in his fifties, as Jakli had indicated. He was older, perhaps much older, though only his rheumy eyes and the rough yellow ridges on his fingernails showed it. The man looked down at the dirt in front of him and made a grunting noise, an old man's noise. But Shan believed none of it. Not the absent, drooping eyes, not the drool, not the muttering.
It was the fingers he had noticed first, while still standing by Jakli. The fingers weren't just drooping down, they were carefully aligned, with the left hand flat in the lap, the right draped on the right knee, palms inward, fingers aimed down, thumb slightly apart. It was a mudra, the Earth Touching mudra, invoking the land deity, calling it to witness. And between the fingers of the right hand was a small dried flower.
There was a connection Jakli had apparently overlooked. The waterkeeper was hired by the Agricultural Council. And Lau had served for years on the council.
Shan began arranging his own fingers carefully, in a fashion he had learned in Lhadrung, with his hands cupped, pressed together, the fingertips touching, the thumbs pressing against each other.
The waterkeeper's eyes drifted, passing over Shan again as if he were not there. The last of the bags for the kitchens was unloaded, and the men began to bunch up near the stairs, watching the loudspeakers as if expecting new instructions.
Shan did not move. He fixed his eyes on those of the waterkeeper.
Finally the man's eyes found Shan's hands. His head made a quick, trembling motion as if his mind itself were blinking. With one glance Shan understood. The man saw what Shan had made, a mudra, the mudra of the Treasure Flask, the sign of the sacred receptacle. He saw what it was, and he saw that Shan knew he had seen.
The hoods over the waterkeeper's eyes slid away. His eyes did not move in their sockets, but his head rose slowly until he met Shan's gaze.
"I have been to your cave, Rinpoche," Shan whispered in Tibetan. "I am going to help you. I am going to help the children."
The waterkeeper did not reply, but after a moment took Shan's hands and squeezed them slowly, but hard. "Even if you find the one, you can't take it back." The words came so suddenly, in Tibetan, and in such a low, whispered voice that Shan almost thought it was only in his head. But the man's moist eyes grew wider, and his mouth moved again. "You can only take it forward," he said hoarsely, and his eyes shifted toward the mountains, towards the Kunlun and Tibet.
The memory of Bajys's words flooded over him. That was the one I loved, he had said of Khitai, as if there were many Khitais. That was the one I was to keep safe. Bajys hadn't understood, or if he had understood, hadn't cared, that Khitai was still alive. What had broken Bajys, what had sent him fleeing, whimpering, raving, toward Lau was a broken trust. Someone had discovered a momentous secret, Bajys' secret, and because the secret was known, Bajys's world was ending. Now the teacher, the old lama who was the waterkeeper, was speaking in the same riddles. Maybe Bajys had not been speaking of a boy after all, but of an object. You can't take it back. You can only take it forward.
Suddenly the truck engine roared to life. The old man rose, his eyes assuming their drowsy, half-wit glaze again. He stumbled over his own feet as he headed toward the mess hall. The prisoners at the door laughed at him.
An instant later the loudspeakers crackled to life again. The men gathered around the mess hall and straightened their tunics, then started moving into the throng of prisoners that began filling the yard. It was their turn to be blessed by the political priests.
Moments later Fat Mao eased the truck past the inner wire. But as they tried to leave Glory Camp they found the main gate secured with a chain and padlock, no guard in sight. They waited nervously for ten minutes, then Fat Mao inched their truck toward the administration building. A figure emerged, not a guard but a Chinese clerk in a white shirt frayed at the cuffs.
"You were told what to do," the man said in shrill voice. "The rest of the cargo is unloaded tomorrow."
"So we will be here tomorrow," Fat Mao said. "At dawn if you wish."
A sneer rose on the clerk's face and he unfolded a slip of a paper from his pocket. "We are authorized to receive one shipment a week," he squeaked. "You are authorized to be paid for one shipment a week. The full cargo was accepted by signature at the kitchen." He waved the paper near Fat Mao's face. "You think you'll come back tomorrow and be paid for two shipments? Not a chance."
"Don't be ridiculous. We only get paid for shipments we deliver."
"Exactly," the clerk said with a victorious wave of his hand. "And you propose to deliver only a half-loaded truck tomorrow." He raised his nose and seemed to point it at Fat Mao. "There are campaigns against corruption."
Shan watched the Uighur's jaw tighten as he tried to control his anger. "Then we will unload the bags on the dock. Tomorrow you can move them inside."
"Your payment is for delivery inside the warehouse. Cheating on labor is another form of corruption," the clerk snapped back.
"So open the warehouse."
"The warehouse is closed by order of Major Bao of Public Security. You have been permitted to use the repair bay tonight." He pointed to a tall structure beyond the office that was nothing more than a high roof supported by four posts, with a workbench at one end. "But I warn you," he added in his shrill voice, "we have a complete inventory of all tools."
"We are supposed to be back with our families tonight," Fat Mao protested. "Our people expect us in Yoktian."
"We all must make sacrifices. That is the essence of Glory Camp," the clerk said happily, as if grateful for the chance to offer political advice, then spun about and marched toward the office building.
Fat Mao stared venomously at the clerk, and then, with a glance toward Jakli, put the truck into gear and drove toward the repair bay. "Campaigns against corruption," he muttered. "How about a campaign against stupidity?"
Shan remembered the knob guard. "He mentioned Major Bao," he said to the Uighur. The Brigade ran the camp, the prosecutor kept it filled, but the knobs apparently used it at their convenience.
Fat Mao grimaced. "Head of Public Security in Yoktian. Lieutenant Sui's boss. The two people you never want to cross in this county are Major Bao and Prosecutor Xu."
The Uighur and the Kazakh men rearranged sacks of rice in the cargo bay into makeshift beds and immediately laid down to sleep. Shan stepped toward Jakli, who stood by one of the posts supporting the roof, staring toward the prisoner yard.
"I never expected this. I'm sorry," she said. "Jowa spoke to me at Lau's cabin. He told me they were working on a way out for you, out of China, that there are people at the United Nations who would take care of you once you crossed the border. I wasn't thinking. That kind of opportunity never comes for most of us. We never should have asked you to take this kind of risk."
"It's just kind words they speak to me sometimes," Shan said. "Just their way of giving me hope. It will be years. Most likely, it will never happen." He stared toward the mess hall where he had last seen the waterkeeper, then toward the barracks with the wire windows, the special holding cells. He had forgotten to ask the waterkeeper a question. Did he know Gendun? "And no one forced me here," he added, trying to force a smile.
Jakli shifted her gaze back toward the prisoner yard. Not the yard, Shan saw after a moment, but the wire, or the rope corral adjoining the wire. "There used to be more horses," she said in a sad tone. "They take horses in trains to the east from Kashgar now. There are factories there that do nothing but kill horses. They put the meat in cans. So the government can boast about how well the people are fed. Now they want all the herds, even the wild ones."
Jowa had been right, Shan thought. The Poverty Scheme was a liquidation program. In the name of liquidating inefficient assets, the government was liquidating the entire nomad way of life. A private, politically correct scheme for achieving the final stage of what Beijing had started decades earlier.
"Why a white horse?" Shan asked.
"White horses are for gifts."
"Wedding gifts, you mean?" Shan asked, turning to look her in the eyes.
"Not only weddings. Namegiving days. Special festivals," she said shifting her gaze back toward the horse. "But especially weddings," she added with a shy but determined smile that said she would say no more about the topic.
"And Wangtu talked about Lau reading names from the five twenty-ninth and-"
"And 1997," Jakli finished. "Political demonstrations. The five twenty-ninth means the May 29 uprising in 1962. Kazakhs and Uighurs fought against the government, in Yining. Many were killed. The government never reported the deaths. But we know the names. We honor the names, by reading them out loud at clan gatherings. Then in 1997 there was more fighting. The PLA was called in. Machine guns were used. Bombs went off in Urumqi."
"Was Lau a dissident?"
"Someone who reads the names of heroes to children, is that a dissident?"
"You know what I mean. Was she marked for criticizing the government somehow?"
"No." It seemed to take a great act of willpower for Jakli to turn away from the horse. She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. There would be no murder to investigate. There might have been an announcement about a political correction. Maybe a lie about her being transferred. But just no more Lau." She pulled a folded, tattered envelope out of her pocket, then stepped to the cab of the truck and climbed up, as if to read its contents.
Shan realized that if he climbed the remaining sacks of the cargo bay into the deep shadow cast by the roof of the repair bay, he would have a clear view of the administrative compound without being visible from the outside. He nestled onto the sacks at the top and did what he did best. He watched.
The warehouse, apparently usually open, was locked for some reason. There were no windows on the three sides he had observed thus far and only the single set of doors at the loading bay. The compound was quiet. The afternoon classes were in session. The only sign of life came from the boiler building, where several men hauled coal from the pile, and the small shed, where the solitary knob guard stood, occasionally pacing around the structure, sometimes raising and sighting along his weapon toward the horizon. The administration building remained quiet, although the sound of music drifted out of an open window. It was a military march, from a badly scratched recording, played again and again.
He drifted into sleep. When he woke, a new car was parked by the administration building- a Red Flag limousine. The music from the administration building had stopped, but there was no sign of activity from the new arrival. Inside the inner wire a few prisoners drifted around the mess hall. A class sat outside now, around the pole in the center of the prisoner compound that held the red flag of the People's Republic. The door of the warehouse remained closed. The workers at the coal pile still fed the boiler. But the guard at the shed had brought a chair to the front of the structure. He was slumped in it as though asleep, his weapon hanging from the back of the chair.
Slowly, his eyes shifting from the guard to the administration building and back again, Shan climbed down from his perch. Jakli had joined Fat Mao and her cousins and was sleeping, the tattered envelope held between her palms as though she had been praying over it.
He walked toward the warehouse, fighting the urge to run, watching the door by the empty limousine and, in the opposite direction, the solitary sleeping guard. It was indeed locked, but as he pressed the latch he thought he heard a voice.
"Who is it?" Shan whispered, first in Tibetan, then in Mandarin.
There seemed to be a reply, a low sound, but whether it was a word or simply a moan he could not tell.
He could not risk attracting attention. Shan quickly stepped away from the doors and moved around the edge of the building, hoping to find a window in the far end. There was none. He turned to face the boiler house and beyond it, the cemetery. The shed was quiet, the administration building still, the gate unmanned. He set a course toward the shed with the Public Security guard. Thirty feet away, close enough to hear deep snoring from the knob in the chair, he veered toward the boiler house.
A small column of greasy smoke rose from the chimney, drifting toward the mountains. Half a dozen men labored at the mound of coal adjacent to the structure, loading oversized wheelbarrows that they pushed through the open front of the buildng and dumped at the boiler, where another man shoveled the coal into the fire.
The six men were different from the other prisoners. They did not wear the coarse grey uniforms of the men inside the wire, and though their clothes were stained with coal dust, the colors of their shirts and vests were still bright enough to mark them as recent arrivals. Perhaps, Shan considered, they were more of Xu's special detainees. But they seemed somehow different. Wangtu and the others had been given light duties. These men had the hardest labor in the camp, as if they were destined for the harshest fate. But the faces of the men seemed to say otherwise. There was no surrender, none of the bitter resignation to surrendering a piece of their lives to the political officers. They were rough men, thick with muscle, none of them Han. They did not seem to take their labor seriously, as though they could be relieved, or even freed, at any moment. But they expected no relief from Shan. Three of the men glared at him and looked away. The others continued their work while silently frowning at him. Then he remembered the computer data that Fat Mao had shown them. There were other reservations at Glory Camp, for the Brigade, and for the special knob boot squads whose job it was to fight reactionaries and insurgents.
Shan moved into the shadow under the roof and looked back. Nothing had changed. The limousine was still at the office. The knob was still asleep. He studied the building. It contained only machinery, the boiler and the small old turbine generator it powered. There was a workbench with mechanic's tools by the generator. No one else was in the structure except the man at the open boiler door. He stopped, silhouetted by the intense fire, and leaned on his shovel as soon as he noticed Shan.
As Shan nodded awkwardly and ventured a step closer, the man wiped the soot from his brow. Shan froze in confusion. The man's skin was white. The stranger pushed back his filthy cap, revealing a swath of long blond hair. A flicker of interest passed over his face as Shan approached, and with a heavy Western-style hiking boot the man kicked the boiler door shut, muting the roar of the furnace.
"Hello, your excellency," the Westerner said in a mocking tone. He spoke in English, with an American accent. "Did you bring me some tea and cakes?"
As Shan took another step forward a hand closed around his upper arm, a rough painful grasp that pulled him backward so hard he almost fell. Shan turned to look into the face of the beefy Public Security guard, who had clearly awakened in a surly mood. His weapon hung forward from his shoulder, his fingers resting near the trigger.
"No damned access!" the knob snarled. "No one! No time!" he barked, then roughly pulled Shan toward the sunlight.
"Yo!" the tall Westerner shouted in farewell, with a mock salute. "Let's do lunch sometime!"
Shan let himself be led toward the center of the yard, craning his neck to watch the American as the man made an exaggerated shrug of disappointment toward the men at the coal pile, who laughed, then lowered his cap and resumed shoveling the coal.
As Shan turned back to the guard his face tightened in fear. He had not simply been stopped in his investigation of the men working at the boiler, he had been exposed. He was being escorted by a knob. Knobs did not take you where you wanted to go. They took you where Public Security wanted you.
But as they proceeded across the empty yard the guard's resolve seemed to dissipate. His steps became shorter, and he released Shan's arm. He looked at the shed where he had been posted, then glanced back at the administration building and turned uncertainly toward Shan. Suddenly his head snapped back toward the office building. A figure had appeared on the steps of the building, a woman in a black suit. Prosecutor Xu Li.
The guard looked from the woman back to Shan, then spoke nervously. "No one is to go near the boiler house crew, that's all," he said, then brushed the shoulders of Shan's threadbare jacket with a sheepish, deferential look, and jogged back toward his shed.
The woman stared at Shan in expectation. She was waiting for him. She did not need to summon him with a guard holding a submachine gun. Her severe stare was weapon enough.
With a quick glance he saw that no one was stirring at the repair shed. Would he at least be given a chance to say goodbye to Jakli, to get a message to Lokesh? No, he realized, he could do nothing that might implicate Jakli and the others. His mind raced. He would have to say he tricked Jakli and Fat Mao, that they knew nothing about him.
He put his hand on his chest, over the gau around his neck, then took a deep breath and with small steady steps went to surrender to Prosecutor Xu. He let his prisoner's instincts take over, as a way of fighting the cold fist of fear in his belly. Would they take him back to Tibet? Would they send him to the special interrogation place he had visited in the desert? Or would they decide he wasn't worth the trouble and dispose of him right there. At least, a detached voice called out from somewhere in his mind, you'd get a real grave.
As he approached her he studied the woman's spare, stern face. Surprisingly it didn't show the contempt of a jailer for a prisoner. It didn't show suspicion. It only showed impatience.
He was almost at the stairs when she spun about and stepped inside, leaving the door open for him. He followed her.
The interior was like a thousand other government offices Shan had seen. Most of the space was devoted to one large open chamber with two rows of metal desks, the majority of which were unoccupied. A young woman of Kazakh or Uighur blood, her hair bound into two small pigtails, looked up from a computer terminal, then quickly, nervously, averted her eyes. Someone called out a whispered warning, and Shan saw two other office workers scurry away from their desks, toward another woman who motioned them into a back room. As if they had detected volcanic signs in Xu and were expecting an eruption.
Xu Li waited for him at the door of a meeting room, pointing to a chair at a large metal table.
He sat. She stepped to a thermos and poured two mugs of tea, placed one on the table barely within Shan's reach, then sat opposite him.
"I know what you're doing here," she said brusquely.
It was over, before it had really started. Children were still dying. Gendun was lost. The waterkeeper lama was imprisoned. And Shan would never have his chance to help them, nor his chance to leave China. He locked his hands around the steaming mug. There were tricks prisoners played, to endure. Many of them had to do with simply getting through the next moment, not thinking about the suffering to come, only dealing with the present suffering. Had his hands instinctively begun playing the old game, he wondered, fixing on the searing heat from the mug, focusing on one sense in order to evade as long as possible the flood of pain to come? The monks in his gulag barracks had taught him that such concentration was not the best answer, that he shouldn't seek concentration but mindfulness, to steer his mind to a place interrogators didn't occupy. But he had no time to prepare, and if such concentration was the only crutch he could find, he would use it. His eyes lost their focus as he stared into the mug, absently considering how it would be years before he had real tea again if he were being returned to the gulag. Sometimes, when there was hot water, he would put a weed in it and call it tea.
"My name is Xu Li," the woman announced. "From the Ministry of Justice. I am the prosecutor for this county."
Jade Bitch. Shan almost said the words out loud. There was another trick he had learned for interrogations, not from the monks but from the khampa warriors who had shared his gulag barracks. Preempt the fear. Preempt the pain. If they were going to threaten something awful, imagine something even more terrible. If they were going to hurt you, then try to inflict greater pain on yourself. He raised the mug to his mouth and swallowed half the scalding liquid, raising a long stab of pain from his tongue to his belly. He lowered the mug and stared at the prosecutor without expression.
The action seemed to unsettle the woman. She raised her own mug, then put it down quickly as the heat singed her tongue. She frowned. "I know you are from Beijing. I don't know your real name." Her voice was smooth and supremely confident, a voice long accustomed to being in complete authority. "I don't want to know your name."
It seemed impossible. How could she have known his background already? Had he been so careless? Had everything since he arrived in Xinjiang been an elaborate trap?
"Nobody asked me if I approved of what you are doing. No one is going to. It's all Beijing, I can smell Beijing all over it," she added, as if it explained much.
Shan looked around the room. There was a chalkboard on one wall, with a number scrawled near the top. Nine hundred forty-eight, no doubt the number of citizens undergoing reconditioning at Glory Camp. There was a faded poster with a collage of bright young Chinese faces, with the caption Destroy the Four Olds. It had been one of the more enduring campaigns started by the Red Guard many years earlier, part of the insanity that had swept his father away. Destroy old culture, old ideology, old customs, old habits. It had been a particularly intense spasm of pain inflicted on the Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Old books, traditional clothes, and religious artifacts had been consigned to bonfires. Entire fires had consisted of nothing but braids of hair worn in the old fashion.
Fire. If he set a fire, he thought, looking at a trash basket overflowing with paper, maybe in the confusion Jakli and the Kazakhs would be permitted to evacuate without questioning.
"But," Xu Li said tersely, "I am still the prosecutor."
Shan brought his eyes back to the woman. Why was she being so indirect? "I've seen your camp," he said tentatively.
"My chop is on file here. Glory Camp is a resource utilized by many counties in Xinjiang and Tibet."
What game was she playing? Saving him for someone else? Baiting him before moving in for the kill? "I do not doubt you are a zealous guardian of the people, Comrade Prosecutor." He returned her steady gaze.
She extended her mug as though in salute to Shan, then sipped it as she contemplated him. "I have served the people of this county for many years. I am not ashamed of my service. I could have gone back to Beijing when my first tour was finished. I asked to stay. I have received many awards from the Party and the Ministry for the progress we have made here."
He raised his own mug in salute. How, exactly, do you measure progress? he wondered. In the number of citizens sent behind wire? The size of the prison cemetery?
"I believe in the order of law," Xu continued. "I know you have a job. But I must tell you, Comrade, I am not afraid to do my job. I will enforce the law against anyone who breaks it." Xu stared at him malevolently, then abruptly rose and left the room, leaving the door open.
Shan stared after her, dazed. There were spirits in the Buddhist mythology that one might meet while traveling. They would speak in strange words, and they might bare their teeth at you, but if they moved on without eating you, meeting them was considered a blessing.
The workers in the outer office did not look up as he moved through the room. No guards came. No doctors with syringes poised. He paused for a moment, still in shock, until the faces began to turn toward him, then he quickly stepped to the door.
Outside, the limousine was gone. Jakli and her cousins were still asleep. He checked the compartment under the dashboard of the truck and confirmed there was a flashlight, then climbed into the rear of the truck and settled back onto the sacks of rice, gradually falling into a slumber troubled by visions of dead children.
When he awoke it was night. Dim lightbulbs affixed below the speakers of the public address system were the only illumination in the administrative compound. Jakli and the others were squatting by a small fire made of scraps of lumber. They had impaled several small apples on screwdrivers and were roasting them over the flames. Jakli pushed one of the apples onto an oily rag and extended it to Shan.
He accepted the apple and tossed it from hand to hand to cool it. "Did they tell you why the warehouse is closed?" he asked.
"On the orders of Public Security, nothing more. Sometimes they fumigate. Poison gas, maybe."
"I think there are people locked inside."
Jakli shrugged. "This is a prison."
He nodded his head toward the smokestack. "Where did those men go? They were carrying coal." There was no sign of activity at the boilerhouse.
"Gone," Fat Mao said. "We were asleep."
"Why would they need a Public Security guard?"
Jakli's head jerked up. "Knobs? There's knobs here?" She stepped backward, so her face was in shadow. The others looked up, suddenly alert. Her actions needed no translation.
"I saw one." Shan glanced toward the shed, which appeared abandoned. "By the boiler." A wisp of smoke rose from the boiler chimney. The coals had been banked and left to burn slowly. The demand for electricity and heat would be lower at night. Jakli moved to one of the support posts and leaned against it, her eyes sweeping across the compound.
Shan stepped beside her. "And I saw the prosecutor," he added.
"She has much business here," Jakli said, not hiding her bitterness.
"I mean, she spoke to me." He explained the strange encounter with Xu.
Fat Mao pressed close and asked him to repeat Xu's words. "She thinks you're someone else," the Uighur gasped in confusion.
"More precisely," Shan said with a chill, "she thinks I am someone who would be with Kazakhs and Uighurs, a Han working with herdsmen." He looked into Fat Mao's face as he spoke. "A Han whom the prosecutor herself is wary of challenging."
"From Beijing," Jakli added in a low voice.
Fat Mao cursed. "There were six reservations made," he reminded her. "For arrests by knob headquarters. Headquarters uses spies sometimes. Undercover agents."
"What does it mean?" Jakli asked.
"I don't know," Shan said. "Except that the clans of the borderlands are in perhaps even greater danger than we thought. The knobs wouldn't send a spy just to help with the Poverty Scheme. Where else do the clans gather? Where a stranger might find his way among them?"
Jakli thought a moment. "Karachuk. Where Lau died."
Shan nodded. Lau had gone to the desert with her secrets, and someone had infiltrated her place of trust. "Tell me how to go."
"I will take you."
"No. You must return to town. Your probation."
"I made a vow to Lau."
"It is not what Lau would want, to have you back in prison."
"Sure, I'll go make hats," Jakli said in a taut voice. "Bright red hats with beads. Purple hats with sequins. While the children die and Red Stone is ripped apart." She broke away and stepped to the back of the shed, leaning against one of the posts as she gazed into the darkness.
He realized that she was not looking at the compound but at the distant patch of shadow where the white horse was penned. In the distance he could hear its hooves as it nervously pranced about its pen. As he approached her she began a low song in the tongue of her clan. Shan recognized a word, repeated many times. Khoshakhan. The way you tell the animals you love them.
"It's for the horse, isn't it?" Shan asked when she was done.
She started, as though she had not known he was there. "Yes. It says-" She thought a moment. "It says you are made of wind running. I will tie owl feathers in your mane, and we will ride like an arrow into the mountain clouds. My great uncle taught me. He was a synshy- a knower of horses, it means. He could speak with horses."
"You said owl feathers?"
"Owl feathers bring good luck. And wisdom."
Shan realized his hand was on his gau.
"On my naming day, a beautiful black and white colt was born, and my father promised it to me. We grew up together. Zharya was his name. We won races, many races. We went to high meadows and he listened as I played my dombra." There was a whisper behind them, and Shan turned to see that the others were listening too.
"Is he in the Red Stone camp still?" Shan asked.
She made the song again, only humming this time. "No," she said in a taut voice, just when Shan had decided she had not heard. "Once, when I knew an army truck was coming, Zharya and I dragged a heavy log across the road." She took a step away, into the darkness, but spoke again after a moment. "We rode up the mountain and watched from a cliff where the soldiers could never catch us. We were laughing, Zharya and I, standing side by side as the soldiers tried to move the log. Then Zharya groaned and fell down and there was a cracking sound from below. They had shot him with a rifle." She looked back into the darkness. "It took him all afternoon to die. He just lay there with his head in my lap, looking at me like it was all a bad joke."
A gust of wind moved through the silence, a dry, cool wind, smelling of coal dust.
"But you have a new horse now," Shan offered at last.
"That one? Just from the Red Stone herd. I don't have a horse life anymore," she said with great sadness, then climbed back onto the sacks for sleep.
Shan leaned against the pole, watching for another quarter hour, then followed the others onto the sacks. But Shan did not sleep. He watched.
The compound was empty but the lights were on at the guard towers, which switched on spotlights at irregular intervals to sweep along the fence. There was no chance of sneaking through the wire to find the waterkeeper, no chance of searching for Gendun in the special detention barracks. Shan looked back at the boiler. Electricity was still being used. Someone would have to go to the boiler to stoke the coal.
He watched the moon rise and listened to the national anthem played over the public address system to signal curfew. What was the curfew discipline in a lao jiao camp, Shan wondered. Surely it could not be as severe as that at his gulag prison, where questions were never asked. Gulag prisoners caught out after curfew were shot on sight.
He must have dozed, for when he looked up he saw the smoke from the boiler was much heavier. The boiler had been replenished. There was no sign of the workers. He waited another quarter hour, then quietly climbed past his sleeping companions and retrieved the flashlight from the cab. Its batteries were nearly exhausted, its light barely reaching three feet. Perfect for his needs.
Walking slowly, heart pounding, he crossed the compound and circled the little shed by the boiler house. There was a window at the rear. Locked. He put his face to the glass but could see nothing. From the front corner he surveyed the compound. A single vehicle with brilliant headlights moved along the outer wire, a truck on patrol.
Shan waited for the truck to pass along the front of the compound and turn down the far side, then tested the front door. It was open. There were two small rooms. Inside the first was a collection of shovels and rakes and brooms, with a long bundle wrapped in burlap on the floor. Shan had seen such bundles before, in carpet markets. The looms of Xinjiang, especially of this far southwestern corner of the region, had been providing carpets to China and the rest of the world since the days of the Silk Road.
He moved into the rear chamber, which was larger than the first. In rows stacked five and six high were cardboard boxes. Most of them were glued shut, fresh from the factory, but the dim light of his hand lantern revealed their packing labels, in English and Japanese. Radios were inside, and tape recorders, and video cameras. And more than thirty small boxes containing a machine called a disc player. Two airtight metal ammunition cases held bottles of pharmaceuticals, in their original factory packages. Some he recognized as antibiotics, others bore English trade names that meant nothing to him. He pulled a small pad of paper from his pocket and listed the contents of the inventory, then quickly scrawled at the top of the pad, Glory Camp, Black Market Goods.
Preoccupied with speculation over why the knobs had been guarding the goods- were they merely protecting evidence, or were they protecting their investment? -Shan stepped back into the entry chamber and knelt at the carpet, which no doubt was part of the same hoard of goods. The flashlight fell and rolled onto the floor as he leaned over. Not bothering to pick it up, he placed his fingers inside the bundle to feel the density of the weave, for an indication of its value. He recoiled in horror.
A feeble cry escaped his lips as he threw himself backward. His chest heaving, he crawled to the doorway. Cracking open the door, he lay there, gulping in the cool night air to calm himself. It was several minutes before he had steeled himself enough to return to the bundle.
It was not a carpet. He found the flashlight, then folded back the sacking and studied his grisly discovery. A young man stared back at him, surprised and lifeless. His skin was covered with soot, his hair jet black. The body had not been lifeless long enough to be cold. He saw moisture on his own hand and leaned closer. The man's left ear had been severed. It was an old form of torture that had been popular during the Cultural Revolution. When a prisoner refused to divulge information, refused to implicate others with information he had heard, the ear was severed. If you will not share with us what you have heard, then what value are your ears, Red Guard interrogators would shout. The face wore the remains of a grin. The great sadness that had descended on Shan flashed into horror again as he brought the failing light closer to the man's open eyes. They were blue.
He rubbed a corner of the sacking on the scalp and it came away with a greasy black smudge. He smelled it. Shoe polish. He wiped more of the man's scalp, exposing hair the color of broom straw. He dragged a fingernail over the deep layer of soot that covered the man's face, leaving a white track. It was the stranger from the power plant, the American who had taunted him at the boiler.
Lowering himself into the lotus position, he extinguished the light, leaving the room lit only by the rays of the half moon that floated through the open door. It wasn't death that weighed so heavily on him, but that death was so familiar. Since he had left his former incarnation in Beijing, death had seemed to be everywhere. Perhaps it was what one of his teachers had said, that death was the final measurement in the dimensions of souls. Maybe that was what unsettled him so, that death seemed to amplify how incomplete most humans were, and that the closer to death he got, the more incomplete he felt.
Shan did not know how long he sat in the moonlight with the dead man. When he surfaced to consciousness he realized he was reciting a Buddhist prayer for the passage of souls. He sighed and began to unwrap the body of the Westerner, switching on his light again. On the left hand was a line of clean white skin where a ring had been removed. The right hand still bore a ring. Shan eased it off, a simple circle of steel with a crude hatchmark design scratched in its surface, which no doubt remained only because of its negligible value. The pockets of the man's shirt were empty. He opened the shirt. A scar creased the upper right shoulder. A large oval birthmark lay above the right hip.
The man's denim pants bore an American label. Levi's. Their pockets appeared empty. His expensive American hiking boots had been removed. He pushed his fingers to the bottom of the pockets, and from the right rear pocket extracted a rolled up piece of paper pressed against the bottom, where it had been overlooked by whomever emptied the pockets. A series of abbreviations were written on it in English, arranged in five rows. FBP it said, then SBRF, SSCF, TBLF, and on the final line only C.
He knelt at the American's head and stared intensely into the man's eyes, as if he could will them to life again. He knew nothing about the man, except that he had been young, and strong, and jovial. And far from anywhere that might have been called a home.
The knobs did this. The knobs had killed an American, he realized suddenly. What was it the American had done that made him so dangerous? Even for the knobs, killing a foreigner was profoundly dangerous. And what was the American doing that was important enough to risk his life in such a faraway, forgotten place? Sometimes the boot squads brought special prisoners here from far away, Jakli had said, secret prisoners.
Shan slowly rewrapped the shroud, then stood, took two steps, and clutched his chest as the helplessness surged through him once more. He darted outside, moving to the rear of the small building, where he leaned against the wall in his weakness, gulping the fresh night air, trying to purge himself of the smell of death. As he sank to his knees he heard the haunting voice again, as clearly as if the forlorn dropka had been standing behind him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming.