by Knox, Tom
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.
“You are in trouble. I can see. I will help. As we agreed.”
Tashi stepped into the shadows and sat down on a bench—talking in Tibetan to one of the girls. Flirting. Her soft little giggles filled the silence of the house under the Snow Mountains.
Night fell, quite abruptly. Jake wondered if that suddenness had something to do with the heart-straining altitude, but he couldn’t work out the science. He got up and stood at the glassless window, watching the stars over the snowy summits, and he reached into his pocket for his cell phone.
But there was, of course, no signal. And who could he call, anyway? Who could really help? Tyrone? The police? He was hunted by police.
They were on their own.
Dogs barked in the bitter cold outside. Jake pocketed his phone and retreated from the window. He lay down on some straw bedding next to Julia and whispered some reassurance to her, and somehow they slept.
He woke at dawn, or just before dawn: the sky had an aurora of pinkish green at the very edges of the endless darkened blue. A noise had disturbed him. Everyone else was asleep, but the noise was Julia being sick; she was being sick at the bottom of the wooden steps. He rose and went to help, but she waved him away.
“I am OK. Go back to sleep.”
He obeyed; and for once he did not dream.
Morning came harsh and stark and blue and cold, and it was like waking up asthmatic, the air was so thin. He drank some black tea, his hands nursing the hot metal cup, and he looked at Julia’s pale face. The altitude was exhausting him; he wondered what it was doing to her.
“Julia,” he said, “you really have gotta stay here. Let me reconnoiter. You stay here, please?”
For the first time the American woman seemed to succumb to some inner weakness. She nodded.
“I don’t feel so good. At all. Maybe … OK, maybe I will rest just for today, then you will come and get me?”
“Yes,” said Jake. “I will check it out. Then come and get you.”
There was no mention of what Jake was going to do. He had no idea what he was going to do. He just had to keep moving and he hoped it would sort itself out. He could see Chemda, lying on the table, her hair shaved, her scalp peeled back, an arc of skull removed.
They walked down the steps to the car. The view beyond the farmhouse yard, up the valley, was stupendous.
“Now,” said Tashi. “We go now. If we must go.”
Jake turned and hugged Julia. She was still pale and she was shivering. He said, “You should go back to Zhongdian. We can get you a lift.”
“No. I’ll wait. Find Chemda.”
Then she kissed him on the cheek. He got in the car with Tashi and waved goodbye, and then they drove on down the winding high mountain road in silence. The plateaux and ranges stretched ahead of them. Jake took photos. He saw a bleached yak skull sitting in a brown meadow by a brown and frothing creek. The teardrop sky ached in its blueness. He felt like he was driving finally to heaven. The heaven of another god, another time.
“OK,” said Tashi, “this the dirt road the lady tell me about. This is where it get very dangerous. First down, then up, into the holy mountains. She say we take secret route, to this mountain, is mountain of the snow goddess. Heaven villages there, with the men. We go behind the mountain.”
He pointed at one vertiginous and beautiful peak: a slender pyramid of gray and ice against blue, immense and intractable, maybe 20,000 feet, streaked with white snow.
And yet they were heading down an awesome gorge. The drop was precipitous. It grew humid as they dropped, richer with oxygen, the jungle encroached, replete with mighty ferns and palm trees. A monkey hooted. Parrots alarmed the air with crimson feathers. The chasm was gut-numbingly deep, three kilometers or more.
Then they bottomed out and they were ascending again, switchbacking right and left and right, and for an hour they made a dizzying ascent, back up to a plateau. They passed three humble villages, implausibly remote. Tibetan women in bare feet and embroidered turbans were sitting in a field digging turnips, the holy mountains rising behind them.
“These the heaven villages,” said Tashi.
“Why are they called that?”
“Is the fog. Thick fog, so thick it go into houses. You wake up you are on a cloud, in heaven. And because when you reach this far, you never come back. Like you have died and you are in heaven.”
They left the heaven villages behind. Ahead of them the road forked. Tashi stopped for a moment and climbed from the car and surveyed the mountains, sniffing the air; he got back in and they took the smaller and humbler road. This lesser road wa
s barely passable: it had once been paved, but the winds and rain had reduced it to a glorified goat path.
Yet they drove. The car protested and rumbled. A stubborn pair of yaks barred the road, and they shooed them away with hoots and curses. The car spun on, taking the switchbacks in tight sweeps. The track disappeared under a cataract; it seemed they were lost; but then Tashi pointed. Beyond the water, and a grove of trees, the road recommenced.
They drove, left and right, left and right. Climbing even higher into the sacred cirque of mountains, scraping gravel. Nearly spinning off the road. The anxiety rose with their ascent.
They were close now.
“We have come around the mountain, from the back,” said Tashi. He was not smiling. His face was twitching with nerves. He pressed the throttle. The final turn brought them out onto a flat yard of gravel space and a couple of dirty concrete shacks. Like very big urinals.
Tashi braked, the car stopped. What now? Jake peered through the dirty windshield. The lunacy of everything he was doing began to hit home; as soon as he stopped moving, the stupidity kicked in. He wasn’t armed. He didn’t even have a weapon. What did he expect to do? Walk into this place and rescue Chemda, like some superhero? Maybe he should have waited for Tyrone. Or something. Maybe he should have cooked up a plan. He squinted again through the dust.
What?
A group of men had emerged from one of the shacks. Faces pointing toward Jake. They were moving hesitantly. Staring. Shuffling. Uncertain. Bizarre.
And then they started running—toward the car.
Jake saw the scars on their foreheads.
“Go!” said Jake, unnecessarily. “Go!”
Tashi was already squealing the tires, hurriedly backing away, an emergency turn. But the scarred men were at the car, and one of them was yanking at Jake’s door, pulling it open; Jake had the absurd sensation that they were being attacked by apes, by a troop of primates; he felt himself tugged out of the seat by several hands. He shouted to Tashi, who was still swinging the wheel.
Jake was pulled clean away, and he watched the wildly swinging car door clash against rock and snap from its hinges—the car swerved; the men were shouting; Jake was trapped by the hands, the men were holding him, but Tashi was thrashing a second reverse and then roaring down the road.
A cloud of descending dust.
Tashi had escaped, but Jake was captive. The men with the scars looked at Jake and they nodded, and one of them said something in Chinese.
The others agreed.
“Hui!”
Jake was briskly dragged into a shack. He writhed in the clutches of the men, he fought and he bit and he struggled as they entered the darkness, the shadows of the building; but then he saw one taller man step over, contemptuously tutting, barging between the others. The man carried a large metal wrench. He raised it over Jake’s head. The crack of pain was intense; Jake ceased his struggling, barely conscious now.
He watched, head throbbing, with a kind of detachment, as they carried him into a further room and chained him to a rusty iron bedstead with a small machine sitting next to it. A small machine? It was a grimy machine, like a food processor, with tubes emanating from it. The clear plastic tubes were smeared red on the inside.
Smeared with blood?
The uncertain implications of this made him struggle, fitfully, just one last time: he rattled at his straps and yelled for help—but again the taller man came across and lifted the metal wrench. Yet again he clattered Jake, brutally. And this time he did it so hard that Jake blacked out at once.
He awoke—moments later, maybe minutes later—to a strange sensation. A sharp prickle. In his arm. He looked down. There. They were sliding a steel needle into the crook of his arm. A second jab of pain, on the other arm, followed the first. It was another long needle, sliding in.
Tubes were now attached to the inserted needles. Numb with horror, Jake watched the men intubating him. He felt the coarseness of the leather restraints, saw the spray of old blood on the ceiling. It was all from his dreams, from the nightmares: the tongue of the krasue, the many tongues of the krasue, probing inside—seeking his innards.
The machine was switched on with a casual flick. It was now buzzing and humming. It was, of course, a pump. An electric pump. The men looked at one another and shrugged. Job done.
The machine suctioned and pumped, rocking very slightly from side to side, a small but effective electric pump just doing its hum ble task.
Jake twisted against his straps and gazed down at his feet, tethered to the iron bed frame. Now he could see bulky glass canisters beyond the end of the bed. The vessels were slowly and imperceptibly filling up with bright scarlet blood, dripping down the inside of the glass vessels. Making fat carafes of blood. Flagons of rich crimson blood.
Jake’s blood.
The electric pump ticked over.
Jake began to gasp, to croak, to stridulate. He was dryly croaking as the machine vacuumed and sucked the lifeforce from his flesh. As the pump ticked over.
He rasped, in his agony, like a dying insect.
38
Julia waited wearily and headachingly in the house on the road to Balagezong. For two days she stood cold and frightened at the window, like a fisherman’s wife. She watched the herdsmen patrolling the mountain paths, she saw a man carrying a huge creamy red-and-yellow yak skeleton on his back.
She counted the stones on the roofs of the houses, she watched the black-necked cranes glide against a blank white sky.
Guilt and determination held her at the window, waiting for Jake. Then, as her fever worsened, she retreated to her bed of straw: she was half convulsed with cramps, listening semiconsciously to the creaks and moans and smells of the Tibetan farmhouse. Her cold limbs shivered. The woman with the teeth came across and medicated her with cups of warm barley wine poured from a tin thermos.
She lost track of time. The only indications of daytime were the spears of light through holes in the timbered ceiling, shining on the flattened pig faces—plus the noise of occasional laughter and singing outside. And then even these dim sounds melted into a white noise of pain and fever.
The smell of yak dung rose from the livestock below. The fever climbed inside her bones. The cups of yak-butter tea tasted like her own bile. She lay back in pain. The loneliness was intense. No one spoke English, she had no one to talk to. The old woman and her granddaughters came and went in her dreams, her half-dreams, her daydreams.
Men came and went. A Frenchman. An American. An Englishman. But through her perspiration she realized she was hallucinating—it was the Tibetan men, stomping into the house in the evening to eat their chicken feet and spit the bones into the fire, brutal daggers tucked under their jerkins. Some of them gazed in curiosity at the white woman with the bright hair, the woman dying in their house; they stared at her stomach.
Amid her dreams she wondered if they could see through her—see the faint skeleton of the child she never quite had, inside her red uterus, like a fossilized bird with its Jurassic feathers preserved in soft red sandstone. Like a ghost baby, a smoke baby. The grandchild she never gave her parents, the baby she aborted after Sarnia.
The ghost of her guilt, still stalking her across the world after these many years.
Her dreams melded. Dreams of Alex, making love to her by a lake, with frightening flocks of storks and cranes. She was trembling all the time now. Once she woke in a swinish perspiration and saw the old woman eating blue plums. The plum juice drooled down the woman’s face. Where was Jake? Where was Tashi? They had gone, gone forever, everyone was gone, smoked, ghosted. The kippered pig face stared across the room.
Was she going to die from this thing, finally?
She almost didn’t care—until she cared. At some unheralded moment—five or six days in, maybe seven, she summited, she topped the mist-shrouded mountain of her illness without even realizing.
The fever abated.
After that Julia slept properly, undreamingly, and wh
en she woke she felt a firmness in her bones, an energy returning. She sat up. She stood—for a second. Then she slumped into the wooden seat by the fire, where she rubbed her stiff legs and eased her aching neck, before sorting through her bag.
There. Julia examined her phone. And sighed. The battery had died long ago. Even if she could somehow, miraculously, find a signal, the phone was dead.
What was she going to do? Wrapped in an embroidered blanket, she shuffled to the window.
Her hopes had finally gone, likewise the rains. Jake was not coming back. Maybe he was dead. Surely he was dead. But she had to help him, just in case. She wasn’t going to stop now. She’d come this far, the idea of turning back seemed perverse. She had to help him, and help Chemda. It was her duty.
Julia gazed out.
The corn was laid on the top of the houses to dry in the new winter sunshine. Two Tibetan men were singing a song as they worked in the yard, sawing logs. An eerie dancing song. She followed the tune with her mind, gazing along the valley, sensing an idea. What she needed was electricity, therefore what she needed was a big building, somewhere that might have a generator, and an electrical outlet, so she could recharge her cell phone.
The biggest building in the valley was large and tiered and far away and painted white. A monastery? It looked, from this great distance, like a monastery from a picture of Tibet. The palace in Lhasa.
She crossed the room and asked the old woman, who was busy shelling walnuts. What was the place at the end of the valley? The woman shrugged and smiled, toothlessly, blankly. Of course she did not understand. Julia signaled, and pointed and gestured: Big building. Up there?
Miraculously, the woman nodded and smiled properly and said, “Songzanlin!” And then the old lady did a praying motion with her head, like a Buddhist monk, chanting.
It was a monastery, a lamasery. Julia hurried downstairs and out into the dry, dry sun, her head still faintly swimming with the altitude, and she hitched a ride from a youth on a motorbike, riding pillion along the dun-hard valley. She barely knew what she was doing, or why: maybe a nonexistent God the Father would speak to her at the lamasery. Guide her movements. Certainly she needed an outlet for her phone, and the only likely place in the entire valley was the most significant building of all.