Blue Poppies

by Jonathan Falla

  It was all very quick. A last despairing volley sputtered from the garrison but the horsemen wheeled regardless. Attacking infantry clamored at the barred windows: moments later, the watchers heard heavy, crumpling bangs from within. Next, the gate was dynamited: a terrific blast made the Tibetans on the near bank cringe. Only one more minute of shouts and shots, and the drama was ended. In the strange quiet that followed, the villagers whispered to each other: “The Communists.” Then they crept away to their homes.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE COMMUNISTS CROSSED the bridge the folowing morning. Colonel Shen was well informed: he knew that no Tibetan troops waited at little Jyeko, that no explosive charges had been set under the bridge. There was no need for heroics at dawn. The Colonel had a decent breakfast of rice and mutton, then led his troops over the river in the morning sunshine. He had perhaps one hundred and fifty infantrymen, led by thirty cavalry.

  Some villagers kept to their houses with the doors barred, but many came out to watch and stood near the bridge. As the Chinese approached, these villagers began clapping energetically. The Colonel and his men were pleasantly surprised. No doubt they recalled their political cadres’ assurances that the Tibetans were a people crushed by the most appalling oppression who would certainly welcome their liberators. So, in response to the clapping, the soldiers gave the villagers relieved, weary smiles. One or two managed a slight bow as they marched in. In this instance, ignorance was a great blessing: for Tibetans, clapping is a device to drive out devils.

  Colonel Shen rode with the wary correctness of the unopposed victor, his uniform dusty but smartly worn. The villagers noted, however, that the soldiers looked a poor lot. This was the army that had swept away the Nationalists, with thousands of miles of arduous marching and scores of pitiless battles to its name, yet the men were miserably equipped and half starved, their boots disintegrating, their uniforms thin and shabby, scarcely adequate for Tibet. Certain village women were tempted to offer the poor things a decent sheepskin. The officers seemed fired with new-coined zeal but the common soldiers’ eyes had a resigned look that the Khampas recognized at once. The Nationalist garrison, every one of whom had been killed in the night, had had that same look for years.

  It was tempting to conclude that the latest bunch of Chinese was no different from the last. From the outset, however, the Communists behaved quite differently.

  The Colonel led his cavalry straight to the marketplace; his infantry stopped at ease on the riverbank. With his captain as interpreter, Colonel Shen asked the villagers to assemble for an announcement. They had nothing to fear, he stressed. He and his men had come to set them free.

  Cautiously, the people gathered, their first alarm abating somewhat. They noticed that the infantrymen had sat down in the sun, their bayonets sheathed. They saw that the cavalry were relaxed, their rifles at their backs. The Colonel was resting his hands on the pommel of his saddle and making an effort to look amiable—he’d rather lost the habit. In a few minutes most of Jyeko was there, whispering uncertainly. Then the Colonel spoke. He was here as a liberator, he said. The Khampa people had groaned under the rule of distant Lhasa whose laws were obscene, whose officials were corrupt, whose taxes were criminal. Their monks were idle superstition-peddlers who never dirtied their hands with work. The people had been condemned to backwardness, ignorance and disease because only thus could the effete aristocracy keep them down. Their Chinese brothers and sisters had determined to end all this.

  When the Colonel paused, no one spoke. Only the horses stamped and tossed their heads.

  The Colonel raised his voice: he required billets for his men, fodder for the animals, but everything would be paid for at a fair rate. There would be no looting, no sacrilege in the temples, no insult offered to any woman. If any villager had a complaint against his men, he wanted to hear of it. He and the main body of his force would be marching on after this single day of rest, but he would be leaving a small garrison to secure the bridge lest the deluded fops of Lhasa dreamed of meddling.

  The force dispersed. The infantry officers went among the houses requesting billets with a courtesy that left the villagers speechless. The Colonel made his way to the monastery and paid his compliments to the Abbot. And a troop of horses rode directly to Jamie’s house. Clearly, they knew all about him.

  Jamie, with Khenpo Nima at his side, was transmitting as they arrived. The generator puttered, the Morse key rattled, a frantic account of the incursion was flung into the upper air. Outside, Karjen heard the horses coming. For a brief, heady minute he thought of opposing the Chinese single-handed as his father would have done. His musket was loaded and propped by the fuel shed door. He began heaving the gates shut, but mercifully he was too stiff and slow.

  A dark figure filled the radio room door, shutting out the sunlight. A grimy military hand was placed over Jamie’s on the Morse key. He looked up, and a Chinese trooper grinned and said, “Hello, English!”

  Out in the bright courtyard, Jamie half expected to be shot at once. A Chinese captain with a short sword at his side dismounted from his horse, and turned to stare at him. Someone stopped the generator. Puton and Dechen were nowhere to be seen. The monk and the Ying-gi-li stood together in wordless apprehension.

  “This is a sad, medieval country, Mr. Wilson. I cannot imagine why Britain bothers with it. I have studied with the British, do you see? Hydraulic engineering for the Shanghai Water Corporation, work of which I was proud and all in British English, which is quite the best. One could not be proud of this land full of serfs but no wheels. What do you think?”

  Colonel Shen’s eyes never left Jamie’s and never blinked. Jamie supposed that a decade of civil war might well turn a man into an automaton.

  “Well? Please explain it to me. What is the British Empire doing here?”

  Jamie took a deep breath, then repeated an assertion that this man showed no inclination to believe. “Colonel, I am a civilian under private contract to the Tibetan government.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wilson! I have information. You are a soldier. You served in Malaya. I know it, you know it—”

  “I was a soldier, Royal Corps of Signals. I don’t deny that. I was demobbed in forty-eight, and I happened to be in New Delhi when this chance came up. Yes, the British authorities contacted me as intermediaries. But I repeat, this is a private, civilian contract.”

  “‘When the chance came up’? To be posted to this place is a chance? Really!”

  “That’s how I saw—”

  “And what Captain Duan saw at your house was an American military radio. Correct?”

  Captain Duan, standing two paces away, nodded curtly: “The markings are U.S. Army, sir.”

  “The equipment was already in Lhasa when I—”

  “Mr. Wilson, I know all this. There are three American sets, for yourself and Mr. Fox who has now fled from Lhasa, and for Mr. Ford, who we shall shortly be detaining in Chamdo. The whole business is the work of Colonial Powers in collusion with the stinking and ill-named ‘nobles’ of Lhasa. I know.”

  Jamie bit his lip. A Chinese corporal entered and murmured something to Captain Duan, indicating Jamie. The Captain smiled thinly. Jamie thought unhappily of Puton, with only Karjen between her and a troop of soldiers.

  Colonel Shen, meanwhile, had not taken his eyes off Jamie. “The People’s Republic of China has every reason to mistrust your imperialist employers very deeply indeed, Mr. Wilson. Even as we speak, the Americans are persecuting their own Communists at home while through their stooges at the United Nations they viciously assault the proletariat of Korea. Their British and Indian lackeys assist their conspiracies. Did you know, Mr. Wilson, that there are more than a dozen American agents in Assam posing as missionaries? We have identified every one of them. Isn’t that laughable?”

  Colonel Shen’s laugh, thought Jamie, had all the warmth of a Jyeko January.

  “At any rate,” he said, “I’m not an American.”


  “Small mercies,” smiled the Colonel.

  “I thought they were your allies,” said Jamie. “They kept you going against the Japanese, didn’t they?”

  The Colonel merely sneered: “The devious and changeable American is quite beyond belief.”

  He seemed more concerned to humiliate than to interrogate. Suddenly Jamie became indignant. Why should he, a twenty-two-year-old radio operator from Inverkeithing with a taste for horses and watercolors, be taken to task on American anti-Communism by a Chinese colonel? Jamie didn’t know any American Communists, he knew little and cared less about Korea or Assam. He just wanted to know what was going on at his house. Captain Duan had pronounced it a billet to his liking. Captain Duan could take a running jump into the pit latrine.

  “Frankly,” said the Colonel, “I do not think there is much more that you can tell me. I would seem to be the better informed. I strongly advise you to cooperate with me, Mr. Wilson. I require your radio log immediately, with full details of those stations with which you are in contact. I cannot yet say what is to happen to you. I myself will be leaving in the morning to join our armies advancing on Chamdo. My liaison officer Captain Duan will be remaining here with his unit. You will find that he knows something of this dismal country and its language. When I have reported the situation to our commanders, instructions will be sent. You should prepare yourself, Mr. Wilson.”

  “For what?”

  “Who knows? At a guess, we shall simply expel you. However, a protracted spell of re-education in the military prison at Chengdu is a possibility. I bid you good day.”

  Jamie scurried home, frantic at the thought of the soldiers and Puton. But she was sitting demurely in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Dechen stood in the sun outside, watching three Chinese cavalrymen unsaddling horses and carrying bedding rolls into an empty storeroom. Their behavior had been irreproachable.

  It was the last Jamie saw of Colonel Shen. At six the next morning, the horses pulverized the ice on the track that led through the gorge towards Chamdo, with the Colonel leading. He had left just twenty men to keep Jyeko in check.

  “Why the hell didn’t you blow up the bridge?” Jamie asked Khenpo Nima. They were sitting on a rock at the village margin, staring at the river crossing.

  “No dynamite here, Jemmy,” said Nima.

  “So cut it down.”

  “But it is made of iron.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake . . .”

  Communist soldiers came and went busily. The villagers had timidly requested that the Chinese make themselves comfortable in the former Nationalist barracks. Captain Duan had replied in his stiff but frigidly clear Tibetan that he’d not been given charge of a bridge in order to camp on the far bank waiting for it to be sabotaged.

  “And what am I meant to do?” grumbled Jamie. “Wait for them to cart me off for brainwashing in Chengdu?”

  He stared disconsolately at the soldiers, filled with dismay and chagrin. Here he was, the radio operator, supposed to pick up warning signals of impending danger. But it was he who had been wrong-footed. Now these Chinese had returned his radio and were listening each day for the moment their own army’s transmitter came on air!

  By his side, Khenpo Nima picked at the worn fabric of his robe, lost for words. He’d had plenty of experience in evading malicious spirits, in circumventing theological impasse. Communists were different.

  “We can send you to Lhasa in the night,” he began.

  “No, you can’t,” returned Jamie. “They’ve put guards in my house. They think ahead. Besides which I’ve got Captain Duan billeted in my house. I couldn’t pack a sandwich without being spotted, let alone a caravan for weeks in the snow.”

  The two men walked slowly into the lane leading to the market.

  Here, the Chinese had continued to behave remarkably well. When they came to the market for food, they paid promptly and in silver. In the grain shops, they thanked the merchants effusively; they even bowed to the astonished matrons behind the butter stalls. But the Chinese NCOs let their men do the shopping while they themselves stood watching like hawks. Clearly, orders had been given and would be enforced.

  It was unsettling; nor were the villagers reassured by the posters. On the second morning, the soldiers went about Jyeko in pairs carrying paper rolls and thumbtacks. They stopped before the weather-worn gates of the houses, unrolled and pinned up large grayish photographs of a man with a pudgy, avuncular face, a radiant look and a red star badge on his collar, heroically portrayed from a low angle. There were lines of script below, but the villagers could not read it. The face on the poster was not unkind but, when the soldiers turned to the knots of watchers and mouthed a name, the Khampas returned only puzzled stares: “Ze-dong” in Tibetan means “Short Life”: was “Mao Ze-dong” a joke or what?

  Passing through the lanes together, Khenpo Nima saw Jamie peer at the soldiers with deep suspicion. Half whispering, the monk said, “Jamie, I do not think we have to worry so much. We have lived with Chinese before now. You see how nice they are?”

  But Jamie gave him a look of such withering scepticism that Nima fell silent.

  At Jamie’s house, the same air of edgy, unreal courtesy prevailed. Two cavalry troopers and a sergeant had moved their kit into empty storerooms. Their horses crowded the stable shed. Captain Duan had informed Jamie, politely but with no hint of flexibility, that he would be sleeping in the living room. He made himself a comfortable corner with rugs and boxes arrayed about his sleeping roll. The man was quiet and punctiliously proper.

  His troopers took turns cooking and did not interfere with Puton and Dechen. If anything, she found them easier than Karjen. They fetched fuel, cleaned up around themselves and were a lot less surly than the ex-brigand.

  But, like Karjen, the troopers were always there. They produced a padlock and secured the radio room. At 1800 hours each day they made Jamie switch on and tune to the frequency they specified. But there was no signal from their commanders to the north, nothing but a blizzard of radio snow. The door would be firmly relocked. They did not prevent Jamie from leaving the house, but did not allow him to take his pony. At night, with Captain Duan in the living room, Puton kept to her own bed. And when she had shut her door, she pushed a heavy box against it; she had noticed Duan regarding her with an eye that she did not like.

  Thus the first two days passed with no news. On the second evening, Jamie felt suffocated so he went to the monastery for a game of ping-pong. Rumor had suggested that the godless Communists would indulge in anti-clerical pogroms; Colonel Shen had merely asked for a note of the monks’ names.

  After the Colonel’s departure with his main force, monastery routines continued: scripture reading, debating and divine services, consumption of buttered tea and barleymeal. Khenpo Nima compounded his herbal cures; others went back to painting wall hangings or the construction of ever more ingenious praying machines. They tried to believe that everything would continue unchanged. And, of an evening, they played ping-pong.

  On Jamie’s arrival in the assembly hall, the usual vigorous bunch of novices was gathered, watched by rather more of the senior lamas than usual. For all the crowd, there was little talk. Each man brooded while waiting his turn to play. The bright tock tock of the ball was a blessed filler of an unhappy silence.

  Suddenly, there was a stir in the passageway outside and the doors flew open. The players and watchers froze. In the doorway stood six Communist soldiers. They were not carrying rifles.

  The soldiers looked around the hall, met by the expressionless scrutiny of two dozen monks and the surprised gaze of Jamie. For several seconds no one moved or spoke. All at once the leader of the group of soldiers—Captain Duan’s lieutenant—laughed aloud and spoke in bad Tibetan.

  “OK, we are come to play!” He looked around again, grinning expectantly. The Tibetans made no move. The lieutenant’s smile tightened fractionally. “We play well, all People’s soldiers. We like it so much.”

  The young monk
who had been about to serve placed the ball on the table, his paddle on top of it. Then he stepped aside, making way wordlessly for the Chinese. His doubles partner put down his paddle and at the other end their opponents began to follow suit. Only now the lieutenant cried out, “No, no, stay, please, for double! Mr. Wi-lih-soh, you must play.”

  The Tibetans had come to understand that tone of voice. Friendship and dominion, invitation and command: the tone of a father carrying a stout cane. So they played: a Scot and a clutch of maroon-robed monks playing ping-pong with Communist soldiers. The Chinese showed enjoyment and skill; only Jamie and Wangdu could begin to match them. But whenever a Tibetan scored a point, the soldiers would smile and chorus automatically: “Very good shot!”

  At dawn the next day, a young herdsman was driving a dozen sheep along the riverbank into Jyeko. The October morning was gray and cold, a light snowfall trickling from a dull sky. His thick sheepskins were lightly dusted with fine crystals that did not melt. He looked regretfully at the open pasture on both sides of the river beyond the bridge: the grazing was nearly gone. Six months of winter in prospect. His sheep looked similarly depressed.

  He intended to sell the flock at market, possibly to these new Chinese soldiers who paid for food instead of expropriating it. The young shepherd looked across the river at the old barracks, shut tight against the cold. The ends of the bridge, supposedly under guard, were deserted. The men on the Sikhang side had been allowed indoors for breakfast while those on the Tibetan bank were huddled under the porch of a trader’s house fifty yards off, trying to warm themselves with cigarettes. They glanced at the flock of sheep without interest.