Blue Poppies

by Jonathan Falla

  Aben the herdsman took it up. “What choice do we have, Reverence? We can’t go back, we can’t sit here. We have to fight them, I believe.”

  “I’m no warrior,” said Jamyang Sangay, “but we have to face the moment, I’d say.”

  “But you are village people! You are farmers and traders, wives and lovers, fathers and children! What are you thinking of, throwing yourselves at trained soldiers with a machine-gun?”

  “We are Khampas!” shouted Karjen.

  “That’s it!” came a quick chorus, “Khampas don’t fight shy!”

  A flush of fervor went through the village. They stamped their cold feet and looked at each other with keen smiles. Jamie thought, how remarkable that these people could be inspired by a superannuated bandit.

  “Excuse me,” he began, “can we talk sense a moment? How do you propose to take on these soldiers?”

  “We creep up,” said Aben, “through the rocks, then behind the mani wall.”

  “Aben! Every stone is a holy prayer!”

  “Well . . .”

  “You still have to get them outside,” insisted Jamie. “You have to get thirty Chinese soldiers off their guard, out in front of those houses. They’re not going to come out because Karjen’s shouting at them.”

  Another silence. Rawhide boots shuffled.

  “Maybe Mr. Jemmy could do it for us, though,” observed Aben, “if he wouldn’t mind.”

  Jamie blinked at him. The Khampa was a pleasant young man, a far-from-wealthy herdsman with too many children, always straight-dealing, open, helpful. His cheerful wife Drolma stood alongside him now, and Jamie remembered the family house that had been open to him, with the best hospitality that they could manage. He recalled seeing one of Aben’s children sleeping in his lap: how it had filled him with envy. Jamie said: “What could I do?”

  “Well, get the Chinese outside the houses.”

  “How, for heaven’s sake?”

  Drolma said, “We’ll think of something, Mr. Jemmy.”

  Jamie looked unhappily at her strong, wind-scoured face. That was the sum of things, wasn’t it? Aben and Drolma were here and now, on a freezing lake shore halfway to Lhasa. If they were to save themselves and their children, they had to think of something.

  “Aben would follow anything you were willing to try,” said Drolma again.

  Jamie shivered with a pang of fear.

  “Yes? Like what, exactly?”

  The Chinese sentries were longing to retreat indoors out of the wind. The only approaches to their position could surely be seen well enough. The narrow space between water and mountain face was strewn with rocks and rubble through which barbarians could creep: it was that way the machine-gun pointed, along the line of the mani wall that followed the foot of the cliff.

  Behind the two sentries, chatter came from an open door, where the supper was on the fire. Suddenly one of the men tensed, nudged his comrade and brought the rifle off his shoulder. The second followed his look, then blinked, screwed his eyes against the blowing dust and looked again.

  Plodding towards them was a large yak whose long horns were draped with white scarves. On the back of the animal rode a most peculiar figure. It was a tousle-headed man without a hat, whose clothes were covered in scarves and pennons in red, blue, white and black. They were draped from his belt, his neck, his sleeves, his feet. From his ankles and wrists hung bells. As the yak stomped forward, the rider flapped his lower legs and the bells chimed in a haphazard, rhythmless way. The man started something that might perhaps have been singing.

  One of the guards shouted into the house behind him. Faces appeared at the door. After a second of staring, a soldier sprinted to a second house, saluted from the doorway and ducked inside. From both buildings, more soldiers began to emerge, peering in astonishment at the approaching rider. The newcomer was flapping his arms up and down, waving his colorful pennons and screeching like a tone-deaf jackdaw.

  Two or three soldiers grabbed rifles from the stacks; most simply watched curiously. They’d not had much novelty lately. Besides, if this was an attack, it was heavy cavalry of the silliest variety.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A lunatic. Country’s full of them.”

  “He doesn’t look Tibetan.”

  “He’s singing, sort of. Doesn’t sound Tibetan.”

  “Sounds like gibberish.”

  “Sounds foreign.”

  The song soared and wailed. It was not exactly gibberish:

  “Birds in their little nests agree with Chinamen but not with me!

  Birds in their little nests agree with Chinamen but not with me!”

  Howling and yowling: no tune at all. The arms gyrated like windmills.

  “A foreigner, Captain! Is this the British, Wi-lih-soh?”

  The Chinese officer stepped out of the house, buckling on his revolver belt. His entire troop of cavalrymen now stood about watching, starting to grin and guffaw. Wi-lih-soh drew nearer on the decorated yak, flapping his arms ever more frenetically and shrilling again: “Birds in their little nests agree with Chinamen but not with me!”

  The Captain frowned and shouted, “Get him down!”

  But they never did. The loud crack of a rifle seemed to explode at his right hand—and half the sentry’s head was blown away. A second later, the air broke apart. The gunfire was astonishingly close; the troops dithered, dazed, perplexed, where or how was it . . . until they began to fall. Then the Jyeko men came through gaps in the mani wall, bellowing and rushing, a crowd of them with knives and rifles outstretched. Soldiers still on their feet dived for the gun stacks and tugged in clumsy desperation at the bayonets in their belts, swearing furiously. Two Chinese raced for the machine-gun, cried out and died short of it. The horses reared and heaved at their tethers, panic-stricken as the Tibetans clamored among the soldiers.

  Karjen killed the Captain in the best traditions of his family. The enraged officer had ripped his revolver from its holster. His quick firing struck home: a Tibetan fell, a second. He raised his pistol at Jamie—then uttered a peculiar engorged cry. Below his eyes, the bloodied tip of an antelope horn suddenly appeared from out of his own throat. He peered at it, amazed. He staggered a step or two, trying to look behind him, trying to lift the revolver again. But a strong hand seized and wrenched the gun from his fast-fading grip and the Captain tumbled forward to the ground with the long sharp prop of Karjen’s musket jabbed right through his neck.

  It was over: it had taken less than a minute. The Jyeko men stood half crouched, turning about as though more Chinese might yet rush them from behind. But nothing happened. Only, in front of them, the startled yak trotted away along the shore, its rider prone and lifeless along its back with Hector the mastiff pelting after and baying furiously.

  “Jemmy! Jemmy!” called two Khampas, running. They sprinted as best they could in soft fur boots until they headed off the yak at the waterside, “Jemmy?” they called anxiously again.

  Then the rider lifted his head, white with shock, saying, “Jesus wept.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THERE WERE TIBETAN casualties: some of the Chinese had reached their weapons after all. They were hardened soldiers; they’d not fought all that long civil war to be knocked down without kicking. Several Tibetan men had wounds and to these Khenpo Nima now went busily with his cures and dressings. There were two fatalities: one was a forester who’d lived in the woods downriver from Jyeko. The other was Aben, shot twice in the belly. His wife Drolma knelt by his side weeping in silence while he died. Her four children stood ten feet away, clinging to each other. At last, other women led them away and came back for the stunned young widow.

  The Jyeko people made camp, and the spoils of the fight— clothing, rifles and ammunition, pots, precious food, animal tack and, above all, the ponies—were soon being shared out by an ad hoc commission of two monks and Jamyang Sangay. The latter perched his fat buttocks on a boulder and presided with an air of flatulent self-importance
.

  But there was no triumphalism, just chores to be done. Youths led the half-starved Jyeko animals around the back of the hamlet to gorge on the rough grazing beyond. Others rigged the cumbersome tents or scoured the vicinity for fuel. Someone handed Jamie a wooden bowl of tea. He received plentiful smiles and pats on the back: a gruff, workmanlike approval, as though he’d done a decent job in fixing a tumbledown bridge.

  He wandered slowly through the camp, keeping his hands pressed to the warm bowl. The wind threw grit against his coat. He turned to gaze abstractedly over the frozen lake. From time to time the ice moved and cracked, and the noise startled the camp dogs, who bayed at it. Spurts of ice-dust flew up at random, as though some invisible giant schoolboy scuffled about idly in new boots. He looked north along the lake shore. There, ponies were dragging the thirty Chinese dead in clutches by their heels, to be dumped for the wolves.

  Where can Duan have got to? wondered Jamie. These were just scouts, with no radio, so they couldn’t keep in contact unless they were pretty near. There might be a thousand Chinese over the brow of that hill!

  He let his eye wander over the emptiness. In every direction there were hostile tracts without population, maybe no one at all for fifty miles. But if he looked back towards the camp, he saw the urgent bustle, the toil of survival. He saw the children taking nosebags of barley to the mules and ponies, the women marshaling their depleted resources of butter and salt, men reorganizing the packs for tomorrow—and Drolma, silently feeding her smallest child. The tenderness, the love uncomplaining.

  Enough: Jamie’s tea bowl was empty and cold. He returned in the direction of the radio tent, feeling a trifle guilty as he saw Karjen struggling to rig it on his own. Close by, yet another of the impromptu debating circles that directed this expedition had formed.

  “Jemmy,” called Wangdu, “this Dengkol family have heard more talk of a great Tibetan army of resistance, which is forming to the west.”

  “They believe their village friends have gone that way to join.”

  “They think at Moro-La!”

  “We will know when we get there.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was hesitancy in the voices: not the buoyant confidence of victors. They’d begun to reckon a cost.

  “But they are also reporting that everywhere is at peace,” began a bald, tubby man. “These village people say it.”

  “Rumor, counter-rumor.” Jamie shrugged, stooping to tie off a guy line. “Who told them that?”

  “The Chinese soldiers.”

  “Oh, come on! That’s called propaganda—‘We bring you peace, brothers’!”

  The bald man hesitated, then persisted: “If there’s peace everywhere else but a war party at Moro-La, well . . . do we want to go there? Get mixed up in all that?”

  “You can’t go back,” said Jamie.

  “But things may have changed.”

  “Not for this caravan, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s awful. Everywhere at peace except us, except Jyeko.”

  Karjen stomped into the discussion. His voice seemed to grow even deeper and rougher in winter, like two boulders scraping together. “The Chinese idea of peace won’t be mine, and if there’s a gathering at Moro-La, it’s for good reason.”

  “Right! That’ll be something to see!”

  There was a pause—until the bald man muttered: “I’d like to get home. I’ve seen enough people die today.”

  “Now, listen to me!” Wangdu was losing patience. “As Jemmy says, we can’t go back. We’d all like to, but just you forget about that. Don’t you remember the smoke of Jyeko? That wasn’t a cooking fire, that was your houses.”

  A tightness took hold in the back of Jamie’s throat. They all fell silent a moment, looking at the ground.

  “We do have a choice to make,” began Khenpo Nima. “It’s this. Duan is still looking for us, so which route do we take now?”

  “Let’s wait till we’ve tried the radio again,” said Jamie. “We might get a clue where they are.”

  “Yes, Jemmy!” Khenpo Nima suddenly put an arm around the young man’s shoulder. “You tell us, you have led us in a wonderful fashion today.”

  “Me? That wasn’t even my idea . . .”

  But there was a chorus: “Bravo, Mr. Jemmy! You sing them to death every time!”

  “We’ll listen at six,” called Jamie. “Trust the radio.”

  “Trust the radio oracle!” cried Jamyang Sangay, its interpreter.

  “Trust Mr. Jemmy’s oracle!” cried Jyeko in response.

  They broke up, and Khenpo Nima came to Jamie, leading him a little apart.

  “Jemmy, you know, there is another way for you. These people say that there is a direct trail from here that would take you to Assam. It is not so easy, because there are high passes, but they would be willing to guide you. Also we can send two Jyeko men to help. You want to do that?”

  Jamie was startled. He had a sudden visitation of warm forest humidity, a ringing of cicadas. The wind blew it away as quickly. He peered at Khenpo Nima. “So, we’d part company here?”

  “If you like, Jemmy.”

  Jamie stirred the gray, frozen pebbles with his boot. He could hear the strong voice of the monk held in check, all prejudicial emotion kept at bay. He replied: “I don’t know that I do like. I mean, I’d reckoned on coming with you to Moro-La.”

  There was a silence between them into which the sounds of the camp came on the wind. Jamie looked out across the lake, where the little spurts of ice-dust still twizzled in the gusts.

  Khenpo Nima peered closely at him. “You must decide, Jemmy. Moro-La is a longer way for you, and hard traveling from here. We shall have to climb high, and the cold is coming. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. We’ve come pretty far together, haven’t we? I mean, I want to see you there, safe and so on.”

  Three weeks previously he’d have abandoned the lot of them without compunction. What had happened to him?

  Before he found any answer, Khenpo Nima began again. “Shall I tell you the other news? It is only rumor, of course, all of this. But maybe—only maybe—Miss Puton will be at Moro-La.”

  Jamie’s face turned ashen, then crimson in an instant. The blood had drained, then rushed back, like a wave that sucks away from a shingle beach before it thunders in again. He whispered: “She’s there? Nima, you were going to let me take a different route to India, without telling me this?”

  “But, Jemmy, it is just rumor . . .”

  “Nima, I can’t believe you would have let me do that!” He looked around the windswept camp, his heart pounding, his eyes seeing nothing. “Then they’re all right!” he whispered.

  “We’ll listen at six, Jemmy,” said Khenpo Nima.

  Major Duan did not have anything like all the radios he would have wished, as Jamie had surmised. They were rare and precious, these portable transceivers (they were mostly of American manufacture, captured from the Nationalists). Duan had sent out four squadrons of fast cavalry to look for traces of the Jyeko caravan, but only the larger groups had a radio set. The two smaller parties were instructed to make physical contact at four-day intervals to report on any findings. The matter was becoming uncomfortably urgent.

  This was because General Wang, in his bloodless, chilly way, remained resolute in the policy of “Friendship” towards Tibet. Peace was breaking out everywhere: that was the line. After the capitulation of Governor Ngabo near Chamdo, there were few pockets of resistance. Muja Depon, the only Tibetan commander of any military astuteness, had been captured with Ngabo. The few troops elsewhere had mostly been trapped by hugely superior numbers of Chinese, disarmed, given money and told to go home. The tactic served gloriously in its main object: to leave the Tibetans dithering and uncertain of their friends. Half the Khampas, always easily turned against Lhasa, had sided with the Chinese from the outset.

  So there had been no need of reprisals, or the taking of droves of prisoners, no titanic battles or wholesale
destruction. Indeed, with the surrender of Kham, the Chinese had not marched on Lhasa but had declared an end to hostilities. They began immediate “fraternal” discussions with the fifteen-year-old Dalai Lama, who continued to rule the bulk of the country. Throughout the east of Tibet, meanwhile, Chinese brigades asserted their authority but continued to pay exaggerated respect and generous prices. Political instruction had begun, with Khampas and nomads listening dazedly to beaming Communist cadres extolling the overthrow of feudalism—whatever that might be. Chinese tact had faltered at times: attaching radio masts to the golden spires of monasteries had not gone down well. There was great need of delicacy and caution.

  All in all, General Wang did not want a zealot cutting his way through the south on a vengeful bloodletting. The Jyeko murderers must be brought to book, obviously, but it must be done promptly and with all possible restraint. Duan was already prosecuting his vigorous search much farther west, much nearer Lhasa than General Wang had intended: this bellicose sweep was undercutting the claim to “peaceful liberation.” So the General had sent Major Duan a simple instruction: you’ve got two more weeks.

  Duan was not a man to betray his exasperation readily, but the Jyeko caravan was proving vexingly elusive. He had placed units across their path time and again—and always they had turned aside, or doubled back, or cut across, or by some other sleight-of-hand had slipped five or six score people past him. Had he been inclined to superstition, he would have described it as uncanny. Had he been a Tibetan, he might have suspected the ancient lama who now traveled with him of sending out psychic warnings. Duan was more inclined to wonder whether spies or his own troops’ incompetence were to blame. At least, until there came the awkward revelations about the radio and the generator.

  On his return to Jyeko, he had instructed his men to crate up all the radio equipment and dispatch it to General Wang for military use. The work had been done the following morning by a squad under a sergeant. As Jyeko burned, two heavy boxes had set out for Chamdo strapped to mules. Duan had thought no more about it until, on one of his irregular visits to headquarters at Chamdo, he had seen the crates in a storage shed, apparently untouched.