Blue Poppies

by Jonathan Falla

Jamie pauses in his brushwork, looks up at Nima and then at the waiting ponies. They are so smothered in decoration that he wonders how they can see past the rosettes.

  Khenpo Nima shrugs. “The boys have seen you riding about town but, of course, Ying-gi-li don’t know the horse’s tail from its ears.”

  “Arse from its elbow,” retorts Jamie, icily.

  “What?”

  “Don’t know its arse from its elbow. They say that, do they?”

  “So I hear . . .” begins the monk.

  “Well, they’re about to bloody learn otherwise.”

  In a moment, Jamie is striding towards the ponies and the crowd sees, whistling with delight.

  A musket cracks a blue wisp into the air. A dozen ponies start, eyes bulging and ears back as the riders kick. The hard ground clacks beneath the hoofs, the children screech: “Jemmy! Jemmy!” Jyeko jumps up, laughing, as the ponies career around the marker rocks; even the Abbot, beaming, gets stiffly to his feet. The young Khampa men press hard on their ponies’ flanks, thrash as hard as they can in their soft boots, pushing at the turn, bawling in Jamie’s ear, yelling obscenities, laughter and splendid curses.

  Then into the last straight, smack in front of the village crowd, almost trampling the children, pelting towards the red silk scarf on its post. (Heaven knows how Jamie won: maybe his pony was so alarmed at the bizarre foreign rider that it sped frantically, or perhaps his arm was a fraction longer at the grab. Maybe they let him win for the fun of it.) With a splendid lunge he seizes the scarf. And before he himself quite realizes, Jamie is parading on his skipping pony before the wild village, flourishing the red scarf over his head.

  “Pretty girl!” roars Jyeko. “Jemmy’s pretty girl!”

  “Jemmy!” yells Khenpo Nima. “You must choose, you must give it to your pretty girl!”

  “I haven’t got one,” laughs Jamie, as the pony circles.

  “Yes, of course, in your house,” Nima bellows back. “There she is!”

  Jamie sees Puton standing apart as always at the crowd’s end. Careless and delirious, he neither wonders nor hesitates. He jerks on the braided neck-rein, pushing the pony along in front of the crowd. Then, in a swift movement, he drapes the scarf across Puton’s shoulder as he passes.

  For an instant, the noise falters and almost dies to silence. Until someone bursts out laughing and applauding:

  “Yes, bravo, Mr. Jemmy! Bravo the rider!”

  It is the old Abbot. A trifle wobbly and supported by two monks, he stands in the shelter of his white and blue pavilion, smiling and applauding. The astonished crowd dutifully declares its approval. In front of them, Jamie circles again on his pony, beaming with triumph. Puton clutches at the red scarf, bewildered, thrilled, surprised in every corner of her heart.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AT THE END of March, flights of geese were seen. Then, after months of cold that made lips bleed, of blocked mountain passes and wearying storms, the spring came to Jyeko. Puton began each day with a new flush of hope and gratitude. She devoted herself to giving her little girl any scraps of joy she could—and to caring for Jemmy the Ying-gi-li.

  In her room, the folded red scarf was placed under the silver charm box. In the night, Puton would recall the young rider who had laid it on her neck. She would touch a finger to the fringe of the scarf with a sensation that she had felt—but faintly—in the early days of her marriage. She could not name it but she marveled at it. She was in the grip of a pretty imp that swarmed on her breast, frightening and delighting her all at once.

  But when this happy imp approached her heart, three dragons with spiny green tails, bloodshot eyes and toxic breath barred the door. The first was Malice, which would do her good name to death. The second was Desertion, the day she might find her protectors gone. The third was Reproach, which stirred each night: in a vision of a gorge, a storm of black rocks, a horse and a man falling with his cry lost in the roar of water. She would wake under her sheepskins, sweating, suffocating. She would light a lamp for comfort and lie motionless, listening to Dechen’s easy breathing. And she would wonder how she could tell her husband that she honored him still, to give him rest.

  The Chinese Nationalists were still there across the river. Some garrisons on the Tibetan border had declared for the Communists and gone home, leaving their dismal barracks empty. Some had murdered their officers, cast off their uniforms and become traders. Some had fled south through Sichuan and Yunnan to join the Kuomintang army in exile in Siam. A few, as at Jyeko, listened to KMT broadcasts and tried to believe that victory was assured. They sat tight, their morale and their stores dwindling together.

  One morning in April 1950, Jamie Wilson went as usual to the radio room where he was joined by Khenpo Nima. The monk smiled at Puton, put out a hand to Dechen, but was preoccupied. He followed Jamie inside. Puton observed them: since arriving in Jyeko she had become acutely sensitive to mood changes around her. The slightest hint of anxiety or menace and Puton’s skin began to prickle, her flight reflexes springing to the alert. Now the generator began its slow tug-tug behind her. She returned to her work, hanging Jamie’s laundry on a sagging cord across the yard.

  Khenpo Nima had his bulletin ready in an exercise book. As Jamie applied the cipher (of schoolboy simplicity), he glimpsed Dechen skipping across the yard, dodging the new-melted puddles. The clothesline was twitching slightly. In his mind’s eye, he saw Puton’s hands raised to the cord. At that moment Nima cleared his throat portentously: “The final item will be for Cabinet attention only.”

  More interested, Jamie waited for Khenpo Nima to dictate. The monk turned back a page in his exercise book.

  “Word has come,” said Nima slowly, “of Chinese military preparations in Chengdu. Merchants tell us . . .” He spoke in a tense monotone reporting the arrival of high-ranking officers in Sichuan, of survey teams on the dusty roads, of matériel stockpilings. He concluded: “Our prayers will be redoubled. Tibet need have no fear.”

  Jamie encrypted the text and tapped it out. The monk sat back on his stool, glaring at the transmitter. Jamie had not seen Nima on edge like this before. Out in the yard, the washing hung still. Puton had either gone indoors or was there listening.

  “So, I am finished,” said the monk. “Shall you come for ping-pong tonight? You have not been all week and Wangdu declares he shall beat you today.”

  “He’ll beat me soon enough,” said Jamie.

  “Then come, for humility.”

  Khenpo Nima stood, pushed the exercise book into his woven shoulder bag, strode through the gate and was gone.

  Jamie sat quietly, his finger toying with the dull brass of the Morse key. He felt the unhappy ignorance of isolation: cataclysms might take place of which he would know nothing until it was too late.

  Karjen appeared in the doorway and grunted, “Finished?”

  The generator tocked in the background, sipping away at the petrol store.

  “Two minutes.”

  Jamie reached forward and spun the dials a moment, not knowing what, if anything, he sought. He found only a babble of Morse, squealing Chinese music, atmospherics, and what might have been Soviet football results or the news in Greek for all he could tell. Nothing else.

  A shadow fell, just a slight change in the light from the doorway. Jamie glanced up at Puton and smiled. He reached for the main power switch.

  “. . . Fox 5 Sugar Dog calling Tare 4 Jig William. Do you read? Over.”

  “Who the hell’s that,” muttered Jamie, “at this hour?”

  Scottish accents. Coming from where? His hand moved to the tuner and the ill-focused, fuzzy voice slipped away, then returned.

  “This is Fox 5 Sugar Dog, position Rosyth, Great Britain, calling Tare 4 Jig William, Tibet. Do you read me? Over.”

  For a moment, Jamie stared at the radio, frozen in astonishment. Then he was tapping frantically at the Morse key. The voice replied: “Aha! Good day to you, Tibet! That’s fine to have got you at last. How do you read Rosyth?
Over.”

  A most peculiar sensation swept through Jamie, a compound of adrenaline, intoxication and disbelief. “That’s . . . Rosyth!” he stammered. “Just over from Inverkeithing, you see.”

  He could receive voice from anywhere, but at long range, his little transmitter had only the power to send Morse in reply. He tapped and glanced again at Puton as though she must witness this. She watched, not stirring.

  “Excellent, Tibet! We’ve been trying for two weeks, you know. My name’s Dinsmore, it’s my radio. Stand by, please.”

  Jamie whispered, “Bloody Rosyth!” His eyes, dilated in the half-dark, latched onto the loudspeaker. Then came another voice, Scottish again, politely female, painstakingly clear: “Hello, James. Can you hear me?”

  Jamie whispered: “Mum . . .?”

  “Can you hear me, dearest?”

  He grabbed at the microphone and shouted, “Mother, it’s Jamie, can you hear me? Can you hear me, over?”

  “. . . still there, dearest? Over.”

  “Damn,” he yelped. “Just bloody damn!”

  He began tapping again as fast as he could. The reply came: “James, that’s fine, we’re getting your message. It’s wonderful to know you’re well. We’ve been worried, dearest, with all the news. Here’s Father.”

  A solid, man’s voice: “Hello there, son.”

  Jamie turned once again to Puton. Emotion swelled within him, choking his words, springing from his eyes.

  “That’s my father.”

  It was all he could say. Puton regarded his streaming face thoughtfully, slowly nodding.

  She swept the house with one hand, the other on her stick. Dust and dirt billowed out of the door into the spring sunlight. The sound of the brush filled the morning as the generator slowed and stumbled to a standstill. Then Jamie appeared at the door of the radio room. He took a few steps and halted, as though confused or blinded by spring. Again he moved, uncertainly, across the compound towards her.

  “It’s Mum and Dad,” he began. “They’ve found a man with a transmitter. They’ve tried before.”

  Puton peered at his face: he seemed neither happy, nor . . . what? She felt her heart shrivel in fear.

  “They want me back in Inverkeithing,” said Jamie. The dragon of Desertion thrashed his green tail.

  Jamie was quiet all day, keeping to his room.

  In the afternoon he took out his paints, adding a pale color wash to some of his sketches of the market. He would frequently stop in his work and stare at the pictures on the wall in front of him, frowning.

  Puton continued with her tasks, taking quick checks through Jamie’s door. At last she came and stood there silently. It was a moment before Jamie looked around.

  “Hello,” he said, faintly surprised. “Are you wanting to come in and clean?”

  She didn’t reply at once. When she spoke, it was both deferential and insistent. “Mr. Jemmy, you have spoken with your family today.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In Tibet, our country, we have holy lamas who can speak through the air like this.”

  Jamie felt secretly impatient, the tensions of the morning still with him. But her seriousness charged her face, made her handsome. He agreed: “That’s right, something similar.”

  “I wish to speak to my husband, as you do.”

  She nodded towards the radio room.

  “Oh, yes?” said Jamie. “Can he speak to us?”

  Puton replied, “He is dead now. We were attacked.”

  Jamie kicked himself. “Yes, I see,” he responded lamely.

  “He is come again. My husband is a yak now,” she remarked matter-of-factly, “because he has had no proper funeral.”

  “A yak?” queried Jamie.

  “It is the big animal with much hair . . .”

  “Oh, yes, I know.”

  “Near Lhasa. He is eating grass there. If we speak in the air as you do, he can hear.”

  Jamie gazed at her. Puton met his eyes. He had been about to laugh, but was now astonished by her dignity.

  “It is more than a year,” said the widow. “I have only Dechen.”

  There was, at last, a note of pleading. The dragon of Reproach had sent her to him.

  Khenpo Nima came later, listened to the bulletin from Lhasa, then commanded Jamie to appear at the monastery that night and be whipped at ping-pong. As the monk left, Karjen moved towards the generator shed but Jamie signaled him to leave it running awhile. Puton was standing on the porch holding Dechen by the hand. He beckoned to her, went into the radio room, and Puton followed.

  The young woman sat upright, calm and confident, holding a white ceremonial scarf. The radio still glowed live.

  Jamie adjusted a dial or two. He said, “Where exactly is your husband?”

  “At Nagche,” replied Puton. “His name is Gonpo Namgyal.”

  Jamie pulled the black microphone close, removing all expression from his voice: “Calling YAK Namgyal,” he said. “Calling YAK Namgyal, I have Puton for you. Stand by, please, over.”

  He slid the microphone across the table to Puton. She spoke at once, slowly and respectfully, asking her husband’s blessing in her new life and saying that she prayed for him. Meanwhile, she took the white scarf from her lap and laid it around the microphone as the Abbot had once done.

  Jamie sat quiet, taking a toffee from his pocket and observing her. She spoke on, calm and steady, and with gentle satisfaction as though a long injustice was being put to rights.

  At last she stopped, folded her hands in her lap and sat still. The faint yellow light of the main dial was reflected in the corner of her deep black eye. He had never seen her so beautifully tranquil. One dragon had departed from her heart. She looked up and smiled at him with the joy of release for which she had no words and sought none.

  CHAPTER NINE

  HER EXPRESSION STAYED with him and disturbed him. It said to him that she was freed and ready. But for what, he did not understand.

  Jamie observed her going about her work or playing with Dechen. He made mental catalogues: that she was in pain but never mentioned it; that she was almost invisibly discreet but noticed everything; that she worked continuously but never forgot her daughter; that she was a cripple but that it strangely enhanced her beauty. Sometimes there would be an instant’s stillness, an alert poise, and then she’d work on. She had felt his look, and a moment or two later she would lift her face with the beginnings of an embarrassed smile.

  Increasingly unsettled, Jamie would stomp off to the monastery for gossip and ping-pong.

  In the village, the prayer flags were doubled and redoubled, with cords looped across the narrow lanes and wind horses streaming. Every house had an incense brazier relit each dawn. Every chorten was newly bound in yellow. Every herdsman, merchant or housewife in the street seemed to be carrying a little prayer wheel and spinning it urgently. In the monastery hall, the huge prayer drums turned without cease until late in the evening.

  But when Wangdu finally beat Jamie two sets to one, the monastery reverberated with mirth.

  “See how we learn your ways when we wish,” Khenpo Nima teased.

  Jamie riposted sharply: “So where are the radio apprentices you were going to find me, Nima?” The Tibetans seemed to think that by avoiding learning radio work themselves they’d oblige him to stay and do it.

  “Come, Jemmy,” said Nima, with a hand on his shoulder. “The day when you are sick, I shall heal you with the skills of a thousand years. Tibet changes slowly, but only for the best.”

  They were drinking tea in the scripture library. In front of the door in the evening light, Khenpo Nima sat with crossed legs over which was spread a sheet of fine, soft leather. A heap of dried and discolored flowers filled his lap; through these he was sorting minutely, head bowed. Stalks and rubbish were dropped to his left, stiff brown leaves into a jar to his right, and what Jamie supposed must be the petals—darkly diaphanous, like old brown butterfly wings—fell onto a wooden board before
him.

  “When our abbot was younger, we journeyed to Kantu-Dzong and he showed me these growing wild: my best poppies, blue when they were fresh. They are for healing bone. We don’t have them growing here.”

  “But the meadows are smothered in blue poppies.”

  “You have not looked closely. Some have little spines on the stalks, some on the leaves. Some grow tall and spindly on the open meadow, some hide in the scree. Some are not blue at all, you see, but yellow or golden, even. So many. This one is the rarest, the dearest to a physician’s heart.”

  He waved airily towards high shelves. “A thousand years of physic, Jemmy. There’s not a plant in the Himalaya that I can’t use.” He studied Jamie’s face, but saw no response. Nima folded the thin sheet of leather over the dried flowers that remained unsorted, and stood up. “Now you must see how our waterwheel is working today.”

  Outside the monastery gate, the stream bubbled in its channel, the wood and leather prayer wheel spun briskly and a clapper knocked loudly to announce the departure of prayers to the skies. Two monks worked with rough wooden trowels, cementing the outside of the water race with a mix of clays.

  “Automatic!” beamed Khenpo Nima. “So many prayers to keep out the foreign dragons. This man too.”

  A young man sat on the wall, poorly dressed in old sheepskins and rotten felt boots bound with twine. He leaned and dipped a carved wooden block into the water again and again.

  “He is printing Buddhas in the stream,” said Nima, and Jamie smiled indulgently.

  But when they reached his house, Jamie’s good humor vanished. Even as they passed through the gateway, he stopped and bellowed: “No, Karjen! Get those down right now!”

  The old man was on the roof. The radio antenna was festooned with fluttering prayer flags and Karjen was tying more to the guy lines. He looked down in surprise. Khenpo Nima put a hand to Jamie’s shoulder but Jamie pulled free and strode into the yard, livid with anger. “Get them off, Karjen! Do I have to come and do it?”

  Karjen looked at Nima, uncertain.

  “Jemmy,” said Nima, “Lhasa has asked for all possible efforts at prayer . . .”