by Tom Martin
It was perhaps because of how Anton had behaved. Rather than wanting to forget his father’s dubious activities, he appeared to have been reaching back into Felix Koenig’s past, trying to draw it into the light. Thousands of Germans, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, had family members who were intimately involved in the sins of the Nazi regime. But to resurrect their obsessions, indeed to make this resurrection the driving focus of your own life: that was highly abnormal, not to say dangerous. Perhaps Anton was just taking a historian’s interest in his father’s work; that would be the generous thing to think. But then he was apparently prepared to abandon his pregnant partner in pursuit of his dream.
The idea that the ancient Aryans, the forefathers of the Germans, had anything to do with this part of the world seemed far-fetched to Nancy, though she knew she was no expert. Still she kept coming back to her central question: why would an intelligent man such as Herzog – and everyone was in agreement on that point – be chasing Nazi myths? From the little she knew of Nazi mythology it was a hotchpotch of old Norse gods and Wagner’s Ring cycle, with a little bit of Satanism thrown in for good measure. In much of the history she had read about this period, the Nazi emphasis on Germanic mythology was treated as pure propaganda, window dressing for the party’s lust for power. But the Thule Gesellschaft was no mere window dressing. If the article in the Guardian could be trusted, it was the fount from which the entire evil ideology had sprung. And deluded as the Nazis were, the region had a genuine lure, for at least some of them, beyond fetishism and ritual performance. Perhaps there was some truth in what they believed? Anton Herzog clearly thought so; that was the inescapable conclusion.
The aeroplane had begun to taxi, and Jack finally smiled and said to her, ‘Cat got your tongue?’
She smiled grimly back at him.
‘No. I’m just a little tired. Is everything OK?’
‘I hope so,’ he said, his smile ebbing away.
‘How did we evade all the security people?’
‘I have friends if not in high places then at least in the right places,’ Jack said, with a shrug.
‘Well, it’s always nice to take a trip, get to know the region,’ said Nancy, trying to make light of the situation. Jack didn’t bother to reply.
Nancy was just wondering why his moods seemed to shift around so much, why he was almost debonair one moment and then profoundly charmless the next. But her musings on the compelling subject of Jack’s personality disorder were interrupted when Khaled Hussein appeared through the door to the cockpit. He was dressed in shalwar kameez trousers and a small pakul hat. He was handsome, almost feminine with his high cheekbones and delicate features, and he had a neatly clipped beard that framed a wide smile. A quite different prospect from Jack, she thought, though he was probably as inscrutable in his own way.
Khaled sat down in the pilot’s seat in front of her and shouted over his shoulder, ‘So Jack tells me you are going walkabout in Tibet – you’d better watch out for those crafty old lamas.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nancy yelled back.
‘They’ll rip you off. A nice girl like you – full of naive ideas about Tibetan Buddhism. They might even try to buy you as their wife . . .’ He was still smiling, though Nancy was not sure if he was being entirely jovial.
‘You seem to have a very low opinion of them,’ she said.
Khaled put his seatbelt on and tapped the co-pilot on the shoulder in a friendly manner. The co-pilot, who was already wearing headphones, gave him the thumbs-up sign. Hussein turned round in his seat again and leaned towards her so that he could speak at a more normal volume.
‘Well, that’s probably because I have spent so much time up there. I know what you Westerners think . . . and I know what the lamas are like too.’
Nancy glanced at Jack. He was smiling to himself now, a snide, quite ugly smirk, which made him look like a fox.
Meanwhile, Khaled was continuing. ‘I’ve seen lamas using their rosaries as abacuses, to calculate profit and loss. I’ve seen some of them attach their prayer wheels to water mills, so that they don’t have to turn them themselves. And I’ve been into monasteries where in public they’ve denounced the killing of animals but the kitchen storerooms are piled high with mutton and yak meat. And do you know how they kill the animals?’
‘No.’
‘They are driven over the edge of a cliff – so they kill themselves!’ Now Khaled slapped his thigh with grim amusement. ‘You see, they are great theologians, those lamas! They know how to get around the word of Buddha!’
Now Jack interrupted. ‘I suspect you’re boring our guest with your travel tales, Khaled . . . And she doesn’t believe you anyway.’
Khaled ignored him.
‘And the best thing of all are the nunneries! Once I was travelling in the Kongpa region, I was going through a valley, and the nuns were all in the fields, bringing in the wheat. And you know what? They were all topless, toiling away in the hot sunshine! I can tell you, it was quite a sight. About one hundred beautiful young maidens all in the peak of physical condition, and as I passed by the field, every single one made eyes at me. It was incredible! You see they get locked away in nunneries at the age of sixteen – but they are only human. Anyway, that night the Abbess invited me to the nunnery to see them perform a rare Tantric ceremony . . .’
Jack Adams had started to laugh.
‘Now, Khaled, you’ve just lost any credibility you might have had. What kind of young maiden would so much as even look at you, you lecherous old Pashtun?’
Just then the co-pilot said something to Khaled in a language Nancy didn’t understand. Khaled snapped his headphones over his ears and said, in a more businesslike tone of voice, ‘OK – I’ll finish this story later . . .’
‘I’m sure Ms Kelly will be on tenterhooks,’ said Jack, patting him on the back.
As they turned towards the runway, Nancy said between her teeth, ‘Nice friend.’
‘He’s just trying to entertain you,’ said Jack, with a sardonic smile.
‘Interesting idea of entertainment. Is there any truth in what he was saying?’
‘Sure. There’s some truth. You get bad priests in any religion, Buddhism is no exception.’
‘It sounds medieval.’
‘It’s not that bad – he’s exaggerating, or talking about how it used to be. Nowadays it’s different. Tibet is under attack. Nothing like a bit of oppression to focus the mind; even the Bon seem to be behaving themselves and getting behind the Dalai Lama . . .’
‘Are the Bon animists?’
‘No, not at all. They’re not primitive – it’s a sophisticated religion. They’re a sort of mirror image of the Tibetan Buddhists. You’ll have to ask Herzog when we find him – he knows all about them. I think they are all equally weird: the Bon and the Buddhists. They all wear the same robes and their gompas look exactly the same as the Buddhist gompas from the outside. But, apparently, in the gompa rituals everything is reversed.’
‘What, they literally do all the rituals backwards?’
‘Yes. Or maybe the Dalai Lama and his gang are all doing it backwards and the Bon have got it the right way round. Who knows? Ask Anton. Even their swastikas turn in the opposite direction to the Buddhists – the same way as the Nazis’ swastikas.’
At this she started.
‘So there are swastikas in Tibet – I thought it was a Hindu symbol?’
‘Everyone uses swastikas. It’s a Hindu and Buddhist symbol. The Trib must be going downhill if its correspondents don’t even know that . . .’
And now he was smirking at her again, that accusatory, almost hostile expression which made her pause and wonder: what was with this guy? She was wondering if it had something to do with institutions, if he despised her for being a company woman, a journalist within a big corporate newspaper. He had been rampaging around on his own, a lone creature, taking inconceivable risks for whatever he thought of as his work, for so many years, she wondered if he h
ad got to loathing those who toed an official line, who yoked themselves to a particular organization. There was no doubting it, Jack Adams was a maverick, and she could see precisely why Krishna didn’t much like him. He was just so changeable. Sometimes he was quite the action hero, suave, confident, and then he became – well, like a drunkard, or a lost soul – clearly self-destructive, or destructive of everything. Everything and most likely everyone, she thought, and shivered in her seat.
Jack took the cushion from his seat and jammed it behind his head.
‘Right, I’m going to get some rest . . . In a few hours the sun will be up . . . Remember to wear your seatbelt at all times. Over the Himalayas, there are lots of air pockets – a small plane like this can drop a hundred feet in a couple of seconds. I’ve seen people break their necks on the ceiling . . .’
‘Kind of you to be concerned,’ she said.
‘Well, if you break your neck, I don’t get paid,’ he said, roughly, but again with a creeping sort of humour, and then he shut his eyes.
Nancy stared out the window into the darkness as the engines roared, and the lights of Delhi spread out beneath her.
28
In the darkness of the jungle, the Abbot’s deputy studied Anton Herzog with suspicion in his eyes and asked the question again, to make sure the white man understood.
‘You flew to Lhasa four months ago?’
Herzog nodded. He was calmer now, and he had opened his eyes. His dreams had receded. He saw the jungle all around, heard the clicking of prayer beads and the murmuring of the monks. And this old man before him, he knew him to be a lama, and he sensed he was afraid.
‘Yes,’ Herzog said quietly. ‘If you say we are in the Seventh month now, then yes, it was four months ago.’
The Abbot’s deputy breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the white man was making some sense. He had taken a little food and water and his voice was stronger now, his train of thought more cogent. And yet, his claim was preposterous: he could not have been to Shangri-La. Speaking loudly and slowly, aware of the fragility of the white man’s reason, the Abbot’s deputy said, ‘Why did you go to Pemako?’
‘Everything that I have been working on led me to believe that, at last, I had a clear idea of where I ought to look.’ The white man broke into a fit of coughing before recommencing. ‘Through a process of triangulation, involving my father’s stories, and my own decades of research in the dusty libraries of a hundred Himalayan lamaseries and the thousands upon thousands of hours I have spent talking to gurus and monks, I had narrowed down my search to the high southern valleys of Pemako that open out on to the Tsangpo valley floor.’
‘How could you be so sure?’
‘All the evidence pointed to Pemako, but in the end, just to be certain, I consulted the Oracle. In one of the least ambiguous readings I have ever received from it in all my years of practice, it ordered me to go . . .’
The Abbot’s deputy looked sceptical.
‘And you left everything – your job – you say you are a journalist?’
‘It is my job to travel and research stories. I never planned to be away this long. Besides, my past life is trivial, it is nothing more than preparation for this final journey. I don’t care what they think – this is the end. I don’t give a damn about the newspaper, I don’t give a damn about my former life.’
‘You were travelling alone?’
‘No. I was travelling with a terton, a lama by the name of Thupten Jinpa. I had hired him to aid me in finding the gate. I had decided against sherpas, so we were carrying our own supplies. I have studied the Tantric practices, I can survive on a handful of tsampa a day, even when undertaking strenuous exercise . . .’
The white man paused to cough violently again. He is dying, thought the Abbot’s deputy. He thought this quite calmly, and wondered how much longer this shattered body could remain alive. Perhaps only until his story is told, he thought. Perhaps then, he will journey to the Bar Thodal. He would never make it into the Caves, he would never survive the descent.
‘We descended into the Tsangpo valley,’ the man was saying in a low voice. ‘We crossed the river by the metal cable just below Litang monastery – your monastery. We did not want to draw attention to ourselves so we avoided contact with your monks and headed through the jungle, navigating by the surrounding peaks. Finally, we reached our first destination: a small abandoned hermitage two days’ walk from Litang gompa. It was our plan to undergo the Tantric practice of metok chulen. You are familiar with it?’
‘No. I know of it but our order does not permit its use.’
‘Well, it is good for purifying the mind, and Terton Jinpa was convinced it would show us the way to the hidden path that my father spoke of. The hermitage was nothing more than four stone walls with a roof that just managed to keep out the rain. It was situated on a small hill, surrounded by fields of rhododendrons that eventually gave way to the vegetation of the forest. Just in front of the hut was a small patch of earth, where one could meditate with a fine view over the surrounding fields and into the edges of the lush forest. Terton Jinpa began by making a paste from crushed flower petals. His recipe used eighteen different species of wild flowers, some of them unique to Pemako valley and all containing rare phyto-chemicals that stimulate particular elements of the brain or body.
‘We fasted for twenty-one days, during which time we ate nothing and only drank one cup of water a day, infused with the terton’s flower extract. By the fifth day I thought that I was going to die. My head was aching as if it was being crushed in a vice and my eyes were throbbing in their sockets. My tongue seemed to be glued to the roof of my mouth; my cheeks stuck to my gums. We could barely lift our limbs, and simply sat cross-legged outside the hermitage day and night, unless it rained, in which case we would retreat into the dark of the hut. When I closed my eyes all I could see, hear and feel was water; the rolling waves of an endless freshwater ocean. By the fifteenth day, a strange transformation came over me. All the pain began to subside. At first it was replaced by a feeling of fatigue and light-headedness, but then that too passed and I felt as if my mind had expanded to take in the entire valley. When I opened my eyes and looked at the multicoloured butterflies and birds that moved from flower to flower in front of the hermitage, I felt as if I was floating with them and sucking the nectar from among the petals of the wildly beautiful orchids. When I saw the deadly green and red diamond vipers crawl past me on the ground, I was not afraid. I felt as if I was at peace with the snakes and they would do me no harm. The monkeys came up to us and gently stroked us, and once a jaguar appeared from the forest and crossed the field and licked my cheek. The metok chulen was successful, we had left our bodies behind and entered the valley.
‘On the twenty-first day, I awoke and the terton had prepared flower tea, into which he mixed a very small amount of tsampa. I hardly wanted to take it, so keen was I to maintain my state of blissful union with the surrounding nature, but he pressed it on to me and insisted that I drain every last drop. We then collected our meagre belongings and without exchanging a word set off in a direction that both was and was not of our choosing. Even though we stuck to no path but gently meandered through the jungle, we never once hesitated and we never once turned back or changed our course. Some other instinct or intelligence led us on our way.
‘This went on for three days, with brief pauses every five hours or so for more flower tea and tsampa. Finally on the evening of the third day we had climbed out of the forest and were scrambling along a scree path towards a pass that we had not noticed before and which was not marked on any of the lamas’ maps. The path seemed to go on for ever and in my weakened state, not having eaten now for almost a month, I became delirious and was barely able to put one foot in front of another. It was then that disaster struck. The terton, who was just ahead of me on the path, slipped on the scree and in a second vanished from sight down the side of a gorge. In a state of acute despair, I came a hair’s breadth from throwing myself af
ter him. Somehow, I managed to retain the last vestiges of my senses and step by step I picked a tortuous path down to the bottom of the gorge. The terton was dead.’
Anton Herzog had paused. If he was expecting a reaction from the Abbot’s deputy, none came. There was just the rain and the background noise of the forest: the animals hooting, the birds calling from their perches in the branches. The Abbot’s deputy was staring in horror and confusion at the man before him. He did not know what to think; he certainly could find nothing to say. After a minute’s silence, Herzog began again.
‘Starved and with my sensitivities heightened by the disciplines of recent weeks, I stood for a long time at the bottom of this gorge, wailing my grief. Somehow, I managed to drag the terton’s body into the sunlight of the scree slope. There, in the cool, crystalline air of the mountains, I prepared his corpse for sky-burial. I was so weakened I could barely do this, even though I had an Indian army knife. Once I had chopped him up and the beastly griffin vultures had massed and were impatiently awaiting their feast, I retired to a rock higher up the hill and lay down in terrible exhaustion.
‘In this state I must have lain for two days and two nights, wrapped in a yak’s-wool coat, a chuba, starved to the point of madness. With no more flower tea to maintain my psychic functions, my mind and body began to shut down. Gazing up into the darkness, I floated over the Himalayas and visited the stars and the moon. I journeyed with the terton to the abyss and saw the sea of eternity below. I was slipping from this realm and I began to feel that this would not be so grave, that I had far to travel . . .