Blue Poppies

by Jonathan Falla

  The crowd all around him gave a low murmur of dismay. Just then, scarcely a soul would have gone to India. A woman spat in disgust: she probably did not know what a mosquito was, but she wanted none of them. Jamie said: “Or you can try for Lhasa. There’s Chinese waiting just down the road; it means a fight. But if you don’t stand up to Duan, the Tibet you know is finished. It will die. . . .”

  “We can make peace!” cried Khenpo Nima, stepping through the ring to face Jamie. “We have lived in peace with the Chinese before.”

  “They’ll break Tibet apart, Nima, now or next year. They’ll do it sometime. They’ll finish Tibet for good.”

  The tight-pressed people in the ring began to sway, to stagger. Khenpo Nima glared at Jamie, livid with anger. “You tell these villagers to go and die, Jemmy? And you can go home? We don’t like that, Jemmy. You just leave now, please, you just go after that filthy governor at once.”

  “Are you giving me orders, Nima?” He faced the monk squarely.

  But a woman intervened, demanding: “Are you leaving us now, Mr. Jemmy?” Shrewd and hideous, she was looking right into his eyes. “Going away to your own people, and leaving us?”

  “You are my people,” said Jamie.

  “Very nice,” snapped Khenpo Nima. “Now you answer that person.”

  Jamie felt suddenly content with this. He said: “If you choose to fight, I’ll be with you.”

  “Yes! Yes!” spat Karjen, stamping his foot in deep gratification. By him, the novices slapped their hands together by their thighs, as if to say the debate was won. Gruff herdsmen and half-starved traders cheered. The women of Jyeko looked Jamie carefully up and down, checking for the crack in him. Seeing none, they nodded in slow approval. But Khenpo Nima felt his own world cracking and crumbling.

  The Chinese troopers carried away with them a small leather pouch containing a letter written by Khenpo Nima on a page torn from Jamie’s sketchbook. This respectfully informed Major Duan that, as night was now falling, the people of Jyeko would be with him in the morning.

  As soon as the troopers went over the brow of the hill, the Khampas began redistributing captured rifles and ammunition and debating how best to mount a surprise attack. There were perhaps fifty men of fighting age among the villagers—and how many Chinese at Kantu-Dzong? Two hundred and fifty? Never mind: Jyeko was burning anew.

  Surprise was clearly of the essence. Ironically it fell partly to Khenpo Nima to provide the means. Wangdu announced that Nima knew the route by which they could come upon the rear of the fort and over the low wall at the back.

  “Through the valley of blue poppies,” Wangdu said, “where our abbot once taught Khenpo Nima and myself to gather the rarest flowers. We can reach it along the ridge from here.”

  “Won’t it be guarded, Reverence?”

  “It’s nothing but a little trail among the scree,” said Wangdu. “The Chinese won’t even know the valley is there. They don’t know about Tibetan poppies, do they?”

  “And it leads right into the fort?”

  “To the back wall. Khenpo Nima, you have been more recently than I: you know the place?”

  “Know it?” whispered Khenpo Nima. “It is a secret corner of my heart.”

  Khenpo Nima looked like a man who had been bitten by something venomous, whose veins were even now starting to shrink and shrivel as the toxins crept towards his heart. When he spoke again, his voice was as thin as that of a man twice his age and half his presence. “I will instruct you, Wangdu,” he said. “You need have no fear of getting lost. But I shall stay with the families, who will have need of prayer and courage tonight.”

  He moved away to his own pack animals, his novices going after him. Admiring and delighted, the people went back to their preparations.

  Jamie had no delusions of his own heroism, or his credentials as a warrior. He’d never fought in a pitched battle, never killed anyone: he was a radio operator, a technician. When some eager young Khampa thrust a captured Chinese rifle and two pouches of bullets at him, he’d nodded gravely, laid these on the snowy ground by his well-stuffed knapsack and regarded them thoughtfully.

  “How can you do this, Jemmy?” said Khenpo Nima. Jamie looked up and saw the monk looming over him. Beyond Nima, the villagers busied themselves in the fading light. The first of the pack animals was already making its way off the pass down to the lower meadow to wait. Jamie saw the men stoking hurried fires for a last hot supper before the assault group departed. Nearby, two waved at him to come and eat with them.

  “How can I do it?” he hazarded. “Well, I suppose because we’ll all be together in this.”

  “Jemmy, how can you urge these people into hopeless fighting? Just go away!”

  “Thank you so much,” bridled Jamie. “You spent no little time trying to persuade me to sign contracts and stay forever, as I recall.”

  “Which you never did, because you thought of nothing but your own desires.”

  “Nima!”

  He had never seen such anger in Khenpo Nima; he realized only now how bitter were the eyes turned on him.

  “You have persuaded these people into a bloody fight so that you can rescue your lady friend. That is all you care for now!”

  “Nima, that is not so!”

  Or was it? Flushed, dismayed, bewildered by the monk’s ferocity, Jamie stared tight-lipped at Khenpo Nima. He felt defenseless against the tirades of the tall lama, who now paced back and forth in front of him. He stood by his pack, gripping the Chinese rifle in confusion and self-doubt. The man’s presence and fury made Jamie feel small. Khenpo Nima stopped pacing a moment and stood staring at the dilapidated fortress in the distance. The light was going fast, the cold was back. The sun’s thin winter warmth had fled the moment its beams passed off the big cairn.

  “Nima, you’re so angry,” Jamie offered, “and I can see why, everything blown to buggery, all your best principles, your world—but I’ve not done it.”

  Khenpo Nima said nothing. Jamie caught a glimpse of the monk’s strong face as he peered at the valley prospect below. The wind was getting up once more: it hauled Nima’s coat and robes tight against him as he leaned into it, and pressed his eyes until they watered. Is he weeping? Jamie wondered. He was about to speak some words of reconciliation when Khenpo Nima turned and walked away from him.

  One hour later, the villagers had all left the pass, and the fighting men of Jyeko took the narrow trail that led just below the ridge, heading north. With them went Jamie, a Chinese cavalry carbine over his shoulder. Looking back, he saw Khenpo Nima in the last glimmer of light, solitary, gazing after him. There was, even in that silhouette, an unhappiness that seemed on the brink of calling out to Jamie, calling him back to say some last thing. But the call did not come, and they never spoke again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAJOR DUAN REREAD the note that announced Jyeko’s forthcoming surrender, then sat back on his folding stool, his shoulders against the stone wall. In front of him, a fire of yak dung burned with its sweet smoke. It was nearly midnight. Most of his soldiers were asleep; outside the open door of the room, his orderlies were forcing themselves to stay alert. No doubt they were wishing he would go to bed likewise. After all, did he not have a woman in tow?

  Duan was tired, certainly, but his mind raced and rattled over the rocky trails of Tibet. For these paths had led him to act in ways at which he was not a little amazed. He was not himself, he’d begun to think. Perhaps it was the altitude. The peasantry of Sichuan, knowing nothing of barometric pressure, believed Tibet to be suffused with poisonous exhalations from the ground. These fumes, they believed, were the cause of the fearful headaches that lowlanders always experienced on the plateau. Duan had begun to wonder if they weren’t right. He sat staring into the flames, puzzling over his own behavior.

  What was he doing, giving the murderous primitives of Jyeko a chance to escape with their lives? They had butchered his troops, yet he was prepared to let them take themselves off to India witho
ut punishment. He had left Chamdo with a force ample enough to wipe them out, had spent long weeks in frustrating and exhausting pursuit, had almost been humiliated by them on several occasions—indeed, had been humiliated!—and was now offering them freedom. Why?

  He thought back over all he had seen of the country, and the small number of its inhabitants he’d come to know. No revelations there—except that there were times when the people seemed almost part of the rocks, of the landscape. The little party in his charge, the old Abbot and his retinue, the woman and child, had a way of rejoicing in the bleakest surroundings that at times made Duan want to shout an obscenity at them. On the coldest, darkest morning, when the camp was breaking up to move off into storms and weariness, he’d see the captive Tibetans standing at the perimeter, gazing at the hills all around. They’d do and say not a thing: they merely stood and stared at the glacial mountains, the barren, wind-scoured plains, the rubble and the mud and the snow . . . and drank it in, as though it were a piping hot comfort to them.

  And so it might be that he had realized what exile would do to them. Possibly, there was no punishment as great as that they would inflict on themselves by going to India.

  Or had he gone soft? Had two decades of the harshest military conditioning fallen away? The woman’s touch, was it, or her curious joined brows, maybe? Was he sparing the miserable Khampas for her sake? Silently, with his face set tingling by the fire, Duan scoffed at himself. A pitiful irony there, for she seemed to bear her compatriots little enough love. She piqued him unbearably. She had not surrendered to him. Not finally, not ultimately. She had made a choice to save her little girl: no more than that. There was no other pressure that Duan could put on her that would induce any more meaningful submission. He wondered, uncomfortably, if she had defeated him after all. Her unresisting compliance appalled him: she had the frigid civility of a slave. She said hardly a word to him. He was damned if he knew why he should care so.

  But the villagers. Back to the villagers: think! Stare into the low flames that throw weak multiple shadows about this horrid little stone room, and think! What were they about? Why were they surrendering? Was it that they also knew that exile was intolerable? What did they expect at his hands? Summary execution, surely, the whole lot of them—unless, that was, that they’d heard of the liberty, fraternity and amnesty that Peking had ordained. Perhaps, in every way, Duan was too late. As he sat on into the night, he searched in himself for the fury that had sent him out from General Wang’s headquarters on this pursuit—and he knew that it was fading. So: what exactly would he do with them in the morning? He would be harsh. Annoyance with his own vacillation hardened him: he would not be a soft touch.

  Duan sighed, and was about to bestir himself and call for his bedding to be prepared when he became aware of voices in the passageway outside. He looked up as an officer of the watch appeared in the doorway.

  “Well?”

  “Sir, there is a request.”

  “Then it can wait.”

  “Yes, sir, but . . . the Tibetan Abbot is very sick, sir. He has asked that the woman be allowed to attend him.”

  Duan raised an eyebrow imperceptibly. It must be serious now. The monks had kept Puton at a chilly distance from the Abbot throughout the journey. He nodded.

  “Very well. Tell her to go to him.”

  “Also, sir, there is a Tibetan who wishes to speak with you.”

  “Really?” retorted Duan witheringly.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll want to hear what he has to say. He’s a newcomer, a senior monk, and he has news.”

  The village men approached Khenpo Nima’s valley of the poppies well after midnight. It was curiously still, the wind that had earlier threatened them with renewed gales having petered out. It was, however, intensely cold, and a glacial moon shone on the column that picked its way above the scree slopes. The air itself seemed to glitter all around the men, while the shadows between the rocks were a profound blue-black. After climbing steadily up and across the eastern face, they reached a place where some ancient geological cataclysm had cut a deep notch across the ridge through which the head of a high valley might be gained. Along this valley, a frozen stream descended gently to a sudden steep drop over the ridge’s western flank, above the castle that crouched on the lower slopes. The secret valley was not large, not wide. After no more than a mile and a half, the almost level floor reached an edge and tumbled away. Down through the mountain debris dropped the threadlike path they were seeking, to emerge upon the rear walls of Kantu-Dzong.

  The column of men crossed the upper lip of the gorge, moved beside the stream of ice and among a stone herd of colossal boulders. The high-altitude winds had contrived to keep the valley relatively free of snow even so late in the year. Wangdu led the men alongside the silent stream dropping gradually towards the farther edge. They marched in silence, looking around them at the vast stones. Something of Khenpo Nima’s regard for this place had infected the men, though it would be many months before the sun would induce any poppies to show their heads. Indeed, this was near the extreme altitude for flowering plants. Any higher, and the ground would be too hard over too much of the year for roots to function.

  Halfway down the valley, they stopped to rest. Only for a few minutes, because the night was passing rapidly. Although the moon still shone brilliantly, dawn threatened.

  “We mustn’t stop,” said Jamie, urgent and anxious. “Wangdu, we’re late.”

  “Just a moment to take breath and a mouthful of food.”

  They were nervous: the heights, the silence, the intense still cold touched them all.

  “Move on!” ordered Wangdu, with a hint of shrillness.

  Down the valley they crept, and approached the open lower end. Across that shelf, as hints of light seeped into the sky, an astonishing panorama of Tibet came into view. Awe came upon Jamie all over again, even as his stomach quivered with nerves, even as he stumbled through the rubble after his friends.

  “Faster,” called someone anxiously. “We’re late. . . .” And they began to jog along the valley floor, weaving between the boulders in single file, their rifles jigging up and down on their backs.

  Just before the ground fell away suddenly, there was a cluster of a dozen or more massive rocks the size of temples. Between these lay an open space at most thirty or forty paces wide. Into this space, the Jyeko men trotted. They slowed towards the lip of the valley, about to begin the steep descent. One last time, Jamie paused, raised his eyes from the stony ground and took in the vastness of the country. . . .

  He saw the lead man, just in front of Wangdu, go between two well-defined rocks that stood like a great portal. As he passed through, a shadow moved out from behind a boulder and came in among the column of men. It was at once followed by another, more, a score and more of dark shapes emerging silently, coming swiftly from the pockets of deep darkness on both sides of the path, across the snow and closing on the column, like flitting spirits. For a moment, in front of and behind Jamie, the Khampas hesitated and looked around. . . .

  Then a whistle blew. Suddenly, the narrow passageway was cut about by a score of shafts of light as Chinese officers shone powerful torches at the leading Tibetans. Bewildered, the Jyeko men stood like rabbits transfixed, as rifles with bayonets glittering came up at their faces. Towards the rear of the column, a few of the Khampas began to bring their weapons off their shoulders. But what should they shoot at? There was an absurd confusion of shapes on all sides. Jamie swung around to look behind in disbelief, tugging at his carbine, swearing as it snagged in the webbing of his knapsack, stumbling as he wrenched at it, gagging with rage— and falling, as a rifle butt struck his shoulder with paralyzing force.

  The Chinese were among them, everywhere, front and rear, with orders snapped and quick arms seizing the dazed men. There was nothing to be done.

  Not a single shot was fired. It was the queerest of routs.

  The notion that they had been betrayed did not occur t
o the men of Jyeko. It was far too gross an idea. The prisoners whispered among themselves, speculated as to their fate and that of the novices and lamas, wondered anxiously about their families, concluded that Chinese spies must have watched their every move from the pass—but they never thought of treachery. Then the guards ordered them to be silent.

  They were corraled in the open yard of the fortress of Kantu-Dzong, as though in a pit. The high walls of mottled gray stone lowered over them. There they stayed all morning, forcibly seated in six rows of a dozen or so, cross-legged. Soldiers remained on guard all around them, waving the bayonets on their rifles near to the prisoners’ faces. The Khampas did not need telling that Major Duan was not to be trifled with. They all recalled a young shepherd in Jyeko market.

  They were in shade, and without movement they became very cold. They were not permitted to speak a word and were given neither food nor water. A few of the men looked about them at the Chinese on the far side of the yard who were busily removing all clips of ammunition from the heap of rifles. But most of the captives hung their heads and studied the dirt in dejection. All spirit, and most bodily warmth, seeped from them into the ground.

  “I’m still alive,” thought Jamie. He thought it over and over, because he badly needed convincing. “I will not give up, not while I am alive and draw breath, I will not . . .” Repetitive mantras of debilitated hope filled his head. He shivered, with increasing force. Try as he might, he could not prevent the shivers bashing about in every muscle.

  Soldiers and officers came and went busily, strutting through the castle, disappearing through one doorway and reappearing from another. Above one long side of the yard hung a decrepit balcony of wood so weathered as to resemble pale gray bone. It seemed that the commanders were up there; he could see NCOs and junior officers clumping noisily along the old boards, saluting and entering through a door at the far end where two sentries stood. Jamie wondered if Duan was inside. And . . . who else?