Blue Poppies

by Jonathan Falla

  He glanced at the Chinese guards. It was puzzling: why were they removing every bullet so scrupulously, stacking the rifles neatly against the wall? Why not simply take the whole collection away? He noticed them indicating their prisoners, discussing some immediate practical issue. An NCO was pointing to a space below the wall opposite where a puny hint of sunlight touched the ground. Feeling dully sick, Jamie concluded that this was where they were to be lined up and shot.

  He saw a soldier emerge from a doorway lugging two poles around which was wound a length of dirty off-white cloth. A screen of some sort, maybe. Two of his comrades followed, calling jokes to their friends, and now Jamie began to pay closer attention. One soldier carried a tripod, the other a black box with brass catches. A moment later, Jamie saw a movie camera fixed to the tripod and pointed in the direction of the sunlit wall.

  Suddenly the Chinese soldiers began waving and gesticulating at the Tibetans, signing them to get to their feet. Glad to relieve their cold and stiffness, the Khampas rose, glancing warily at one another. As they did so, two soldiers went to the stack of rifles from which they had stripped all ammunition. They picked up two apiece and stepped smartly up to Agon, Dawa, Yonten and Tsering Norbu, handed over the weapons and pushed the recipients past the camera towards the wall.

  “Go along now, warriors!”The soldiers laughed. “The rest of you as well, move!”

  Uncertain, the Khampas dithered in the center of the yard, until the soldiers laughed again and beckoned impatiently to them. Jamie had stood up also but the soldiers waved him aside. More rifles were handed out, and the men were chivvied across to stand in front of the camera. There they stood, blinking into the cold sun.

  A large group of Chinese had gathered to watch. Now there came a shouted order and these soldiers also picked up their rifles and came towards the Jyeko men. Yonten and Karjen hefted their guns in reflex, then blushed in frustrated shame at their helplessness. But the Chinese were not menacing them. The soldiers went among the Khampas, standing between them, smiling and laughing: “Movie, movie! Tell the world!” A lieutenant stepped up to the camera and prepared to operate it, crouching and peering through the viewfinder at the fraternal gathering by the wall. Finally, two Chinese picked up the rolled cloth. They opened it out at the rear of the party, hoisting the banner above the heads:

  REUNIFICATION WITH OUR BRAVE TIBETAN BROTHERS!

  It was proclaimed in bold crude characters, English and Chinese.

  Jamie saw the watching soldiers around the yard begin to applaud mockingly as the camera rolled. He saw the bemused Khampas frown and shrink as the soldiers among them placed arms about their shoulders, beaming at the camera. He saw Agon turn and peer uncomprehendingly at the banner over his head.

  Suddenly, there was a shout of fury. The gathering of film stars swayed, staggered and broke apart. Jamie glimpsed an elbow sink into the stomach of a soldier who groaned and doubled. Arms reached, pushed, grabbed—and then Karjen burst from the cluster. Something in his hand flashed. His old legs boiled over with the last of their strength and he rushed at the lieutenant behind the camera who only then began to lift his head in surprise. He was just yards away—even old Karjen required only a second to reach and disembowel him with the bayonet he’d seized.

  But he did not cross those few yards. A rifle shot crashed through the yard: a sergeant had fired from the hip. The bullet took Karjen full in the chest, knocking him down in a heap. His face crashed onto the stony floor of the yard, grazing and scraping. The sergeant fired a second time, more deliberately; Karjen kicked, then lay still. The bayonet clattered against the foot of the tripod where the lieutenant stood immobile.

  For two seconds, no one moved. The gun’s report sped echoing around the hills. The lieutenant gabbled a furious order; his men broke out of the group and moved away, turning to face the Tibetans with their rifles brought up in readiness. Nothing more happened. Karjen’s friends and neighbors stared at him as he lay facedown. A moment later, the Chinese propelled them at bayonet point back into the shade.

  Karjen’s corpse was taken outside; Jamie did not see how it was finally disposed of. But the two Khampas who were ordered to drag it out through the gate came back in great excitement. They had glimpsed the hamlet below the fortress and had seen the Jyeko caravan, all the noncombatants and the animals, halted just outside the cluster of houses.

  A long, tedious time later, the Chinese soldiers called Jamie for interrogation.

  “Wi-lih-soh! Wi-lih-soh!”

  He stood wearily, two soldiers beckoning to him from a stone doorway. It occurred to him that he might feel frightened now: he hadn’t forgotten the Jyeko crucifixion either. But increasingly a feeling had come upon him that was almost disembodiment: such was the cumulative effect of months of living so far beyond what he’d been born to. He had reached some sort of experiential saturation. It was a great mercy.

  He walked stiffly to the archway through which the soldiers waved him towards a flight of stone stairs. Hands pushed at his shoulder and he went up the dark, dank steps, then out onto the wooden balcony. He was propelled quickly past an entrance covered by a rough woolen curtain, towards a second door at the far end. Momentarily, his way was blocked by the sentry’s rifle across the door. He had a sudden recollection of a similar moment in Jyeko monastery, when delivering an invitation to ping-pong.

  As he paused there, Jamie’s eye was caught by someone emerging through the curtain that he had just passed. He looked around. Khenpo Nima had stepped out onto the balcony, going to the wooden rail to look down into the yard at the village men. Jamie heard a few puzzled calls from below: “Reverence? Reverence?” At that moment, Khenpo Nima glanced aside and saw Jamie. Though their eyes met, neither spoke. Jamie had time only to register that Nima looked exhausted, haggard and gray.

  A low voice spoke from the room before him, and Jamie was shoved inside.

  “Really, Mr. Wilson, you should have waited to hear our original instructions on your departure from Jyeko. It would have been a lot less trouble, don’t you think?”

  A month or two previously, Jamie would have wondered at Duan’s ponderous sarcasm, at what it meant for him. Now he felt nothing more than dumb insolence.

  “Aren’t you talking to me today?” inquired the Major. “Your position is hardly an enviable one, after all. I’d say you have good reason to be down on your knees.”

  Jamie regarded him without expression.

  “The beginning and end of it is, you are a spy.” Major Duan, seated on his folding canvas stool behind an ancient wooden chest, picked up a cardboard file and drew out a thick sheaf of papers. He flicked through them: “But, really, a curiously incompetent spy.”

  He tossed down onto the chest, one after another, Jamie’s watercolor sketches and pen drawings of Jyeko: the market, yaks, temples . . .

  “I have to conclude, Mr. Wilson, that you were never a terribly serious threat to the peaceful liberation of this country.”

  “What will you do with the men outside?” said Jamie suddenly. “And all the people?”

  The Major frowned, as though giving the matter its first consideration. “I expect that we shall send them back to their village,” he replied. “This resistance has all been so futile. Why did they ever begin it? There was no call.”

  “You can’t send them back to their village,” said Jamie, “because you’ve burned—”

  “The future of those people, Mr. Wilson, is none of your business,” snapped Duan, suddenly terse. Jamie fell silent. The Major continued: “You will be leaving at once. My men will escort you to the border and hand you over there. You will be in India in a week.”

  “What if I ask to stay?” began Jamie. “I’ve a part in all this too—”

  “Don’t be absurd, Mr. Wilson. Just go home. You are of no significance here.”

  Duan swept up the pictures, tapped the pile straight and held them out. “I expect you’d like to keep these as a souvenir of Tibet.”

 
; Jamie took them. Then he said: “May I ask for one other souvenir?”

  Duan regarded him in surprise. “What would that be?”

  “That. The flower there, by your briefcase.” He pointed. It lay by the Major’s papers: a single dried flower, a thin, desiccated stick with small spines on which a few petals hung, quite brown and crisp. The sort of stuff that, in armfuls, you might use as kindling for a fire.

  Duan frowned slightly. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

  “It was a poppy,” said Jamie. “A blue poppy. They grow near here.”

  “And why should you want it?”

  “As I said: a souvenir.”

  The Major picked up the flower and examined it, twiddling it between his fingers in such a manner that it might disintegrate at any moment. Then he presented it to Jamie. “It’s of no interest to me now. Farewell, Mr. Wilson.”

  On the balcony outside, Jamie was about to pass the middle door when he suddenly stopped, evaded his escort and pulled the curtain brusquely aside.

  Within, the room was golden warm, lit by half a dozen butter-oil lamps, more like a shrine room than a bedchamber. Four monks were seated on the floor in a semicircle, spinning little prayer wheels and murmuring more prayers as fast as they could, so that the close air hummed as though with a swarm of bees. By the far wall was a couch covered with deep furs among which Jamie glimpsed the wasted face of the Abbot. At the head of the bed knelt Khenpo Nima, urging his master to drink a little from a wooden bowl. On a stool at the foot of the bed, another figure waited. As Jamie pulled the curtain aside, the head turned to see—and it was Puton.

  For a split second, Jamie and Puton stared at each other. As though, once more, her reflexes raised her up to confront her fate, Puton began to stand. But there was no chance to speak. Jamie was seized by his guards and propelled along the balcony to the staircase before he could make a sound.

  Dazed, he stumbled in the dark stairwell and slithered awkwardly against the wall, earning the guards’ curses. The soldiers took his arm, marched him out into the light and across the yard. He was dimly aware of the Jyeko men who half stood to greet him, “Mr. Jemmy!” before their captors snarled at them to sit and shut up.

  Jamie raised a trembling hand towards them, with a semblance of a grin on his numbed face. Then he was steered past.

  He was taken through the gate, out into the cold bright day and onto the steep, pebble-strewn path that wound down to the village. If he’d not been held by both elbows, he would certainly have fallen. He was stunned, his eyes would not focus, and though his look passed over a brilliant winter spectacle, nothing of it reached his mind. It seemed to him that he had been taken by the throat and was being garotted, the oxygen cut off. His head felt as though it would swell and burst. He staggered and stumbled, and was dragged. In this fashion, they reached the encampment below, where the rest of Jyeko sat in miserable apprehension.

  The soldiers attempted to make him identify his belongings, to pick them up and strap them to a pony once again. But Jamie only sat on the ground with his legs sprawled askew, staring into some vacuum in front of his face. He was in the grip of something like apoplexy; mental and muscular control had fled from him. The Chinese gestured angrily to villagers nearby, and so the work of making Jamie ready for departure was done by others. The Chinese set about preparing their own mounts and pack animals. A group of six soldiers and two enforced guides from Kantu-Dzong village would be riding with him.

  “One bag!” the guards shouted at Jamie. “One bag only!” He barely registered that they were speaking to him, and he raised his head as slowly as if it were a hundredweight of lead.

  “You hear me, Wi-lih-soh?” the sergeant shrieked. “One bag!”

  He turned to repeat the instruction to the cowed villagers who were bundling up Jamie’s clothes. As the sergeant made to kick at the small heap, there came an electrifying snarl followed by furious baying. Hector leaped to his feet. The colossal dog, who had lain half hidden by the packsaddle, hurled imprecations at the Chinese NCO who stepped backwards in surprise and tumbled over a rolled saddlecloth on the ground. As the man sprawled among the pebbles in absurd indignity, a wave of grateful laughter swept over the crouching people.

  “Shut up at once! Shut up!” roared the guards, flourishing their rifles impotently as their sergeant scrambled upright. Hector lay down by the saddle once more, mollified by this victory. Though the overt laughter subsided, the grins lingered on the Jyeko faces, some small fire restored. Through his misery, Jamie heard a murmur close by: “Mr. Jemmy, the Khampas are not afraid. . . .”

  The preparations took no more than twenty minutes. Throughout this period, Jamie sat quite still and silent. Shortly before departure, he seemed to come to himself and stood up. The soldiers of the escort, busily lashing their own bedding rolls, gave him a suspicious glance but soon concluded that he was not going to run away. A few yards off, the nearest of the Jyeko villagers regarded him with more concern. Jamie did not return their mute inquiry. He looked up at the fort—and was jolted into wakefulness.

  On the steep triple bend of the pathway, two figures were making their way downhill. They were coming as quickly as they could; for the child and the woman with her stick, there were many obstacles and difficulties. Still they came on, foolish in their haste, risking a tumble, almost down now.

  “Wi-lih-soh!” called the sergeant of the escort. Jamie threw a quick look at him. The man waved towards the pony he was to ride. Jamie half raised his hand in vague acknowledgment. The two figures had reached the foot of the castle path. Jamie saw the wind catching the hair of both, tossing and tugging it across their faces. He saw the woman gripping the child’s hand, the stick bouncing clumsily among the stones.

  “Hey, Wi-lih-soh!” called the sergeant again, sharper, pointing emphatically at the pony.

  “Yes, yes,” replied Jamie, dithering, reaching for a bag on the ground by him, taking his coat off, pointlessly fiddling with a button, putting it on, taking it off again for no reason, prevaricating, buying time. He saw several of the villagers look past him: they had seen Puton, were watching the mother and child.

  “Right, almost ready . . .” sang out Jamie, his attempt at fake cheery bustle sounding fragile. He picked up the bag and went to the pony . . . but left the coat where he must return for it. . . .

  “Come now!” ordered the sergeant.

  “At once!” said Jamie, but he turned back yet again, leaving the sergeant speechless at his insolence.

  She was standing twenty yards from him, holding Dechen by the hand. She did not speak, and he could not have answered. For a moment they only regarded each other in stillness, with the wind nudging them together. Then Puton freed her hand from her daughter’s, and Jamie saw that together they had been holding something. Puton opened her fingers—and there was the little blue lacquered box from Bhutan. He had given it to Dechen; Karjen had chased her for it. There it sat in Puton’s hand; she raised the box a fraction before him. In its tiny way it was the proudest clarion to memory. It was the only gesture left to her.

  Jamie’s reply came quite easily. He raised his two hands to his throat and unwound and rewrapped, slowly and ostentatiously, the embroidered red scarf that was tied there. The two ends, covered with their intricacies, he laid out on his chest so that she could see them: T4JW. Only when he saw the saddest trace of a smile from her did he fasten his coat over the scarf.

  “All right, going to India,” said the sergeant, gripping his upper arm and pulling at him. Jamie backed towards the ponies.

  “Mr. Jemmy!” came a young woman’s voice.

  He’d heard no movement behind him—but when he looked, Jyeko was on its feet there. Drolma the young widow stood forward, holding up her smallest child. Jamie peered at her in surprise.

  “Lord Buddha bless your journey,” said Drolma.

  And behind her, they called out: “Bless you, Mr. Jemmy! Thank you! Remember us at your home!”

  He went to his
pony, nodding to them in tearful eagerness. But by nightfall he was gone into exile.

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Falla

  Background images by Jake Wyman/Photonica

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Neil Wilson Publishing.

  Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Falla, Jonathan.

  Blue poppies / Jonathan Falla.

  p. cm.

  1. Scots—China—Tibet—Fiction. 2. Women with disabilities—Fiction. 3. Himalaya Mountains—Fiction. 4. Radio engineers—Fiction. 5. Mountain life—Fiction. 6. Tibet (China)—Fiction. 7. Widows—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6056.A539 B’.92—dc21 2002073811

  February 2003

  RRH

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42280-4

  v3.0