by Tom Martin
He ran for his life.
39
Their truck was part of a convoy of four vehicles heading east from Lhasa across the Tibetan plateau, down into the Kongpa region and then eventually on into China itself. The road, which deteriorated very rapidly once they were twenty miles or so out of Lhasa, followed the banks of the Yarlang Tsangpo. The Tsangpo rose hundreds of miles to the west of Lhasa, snaking around Asia’s most holy mountain, Mount Kailash, fed by glaciers all the way along until it finally dived into Pemako and began its tumultuous descent down onto the endless plains of India. Despite the poor quality of the road and its precipitous course, the lorry-drivers chain-smoked furiously as they spun the wheels round the hairpin bends. The intermittent smell of burning brake pads mingled with the persistent stench of cigarette smoke and their faces were gradually caked in dust and grime.
Five hours out from Lhasa, they had successfully passed through their first police checkpoint. A scruffily dressed policeman came out of a tiny wooden hut and flagged the convoy down. Smelling of chang and with a cigarette at his mouth, he examined their documents and then waved them through without any questions. They were squashed together in the cab, the three of them plus the driver. The minute the driver put his foot on the accelerator and pulled away from the checkpoint Jack let out a theatrical sigh of relief.
‘I think we’re in the clear. The police in Kongpa will be less scrupulous still.’
‘Kongpa?’ Nancy asked.
‘It’s the next province, between Lhasa and Pemako. It’s a wild place – lots of Burmese and Assamese ethnic groups.’
‘Like Pemako?’
‘No. Not as weird as Pemako but the wild west nevertheless. Lawless, incredibly poor and very very inhospitable. Hardly worth trying to govern it.’
Gunn had been talking to the driver, but hearing Jack’s comments he interjected, ‘Don’t listen to him, Nancy. It’s the real Tibet. Tough country people. None of the comforts of monastic life.’
Comforts of monastic life! She smiled to herself. That really was a joke. It must be a truly hard place to live if it made a Tibetan monastery look like a soft option. Just then Gunn pointed to the road ahead.
‘Look! See what I mean.’
There, next to the roadside, were two young Tibetan men. They could have been aged anything from sixteen to thirty. They were staring at the convoy as it passed. Strapped to their hands and knees were small wooden boards to protect their skin when they kneeled and bowed – which they did with every step. They would continue like this, Gunn explained, all the way to the Potala Palace.
‘See what I mean – they are tough, religious people. Real Tibetans.’
Nancy turned her head as they flashed by. The two young men stared back at her. Behind them flowed the Yarlang Tsangpo, ‘the purifier’ as Jack had told her it was called, and on all sides the heart-achingly beautiful mountains rose to touch the heavens.
What a place! thought Nancy. How could anyone spend time here and not be profoundly changed? No wonder Herzog had become such an enigmatic man, standing aloof from the concerns of Western journalism. It was another world. She could already feel it all getting under her skin: the cobalt-blue sky, the crystalline air, the abundant religiosity and the nearness to nature and life and death. It elevated the important things in life and made the normal cares of material existence seem trivial and insignificant.
And Felix Koenig too would have passed down this road many years ago. She tried to imagine how he must have experienced Tibet. But there she drew a blank: she found it was impossible to guess at the motivations of such a man; he was even more inscrutable to her than the pilgrims they had just passed on the road. How did he justify working for the Nazi Party? Perhaps he had no choice, perhaps he simply didn’t think in those terms. Most probably he refused to engage with the realities around him at the time – he just wanted to work, to travel to Tibet. He must have felt far removed from the war in Europe up here on the roof of the world; maybe he was actually trying to escape from it all. Or was she being too generous to him? Was he in fact a zealot, a Goebbels or a Himmler, with his own bizarre theory of German racial origins – determined to aid the Nazis, the only way he knew how, by building them a mythology anchored in the Himalayas to underwrite their violence? She was floundering; she had only questions, and no answers. Seeking to divert herself, to rid herself of these whirling thoughts which proceeded nowhere, she turned to Gunn.
‘So where did you learn to speak such good English?’
The driver was changing gear as they climbed a hill and the engine was straining terribly; Gunn had to shout to be heard.
‘In Dharamsala, at Macleod Ganj.’
‘So you’ve been to India? Why did you come back?’
‘I missed my family . . . And I discovered that running away from your troubles doesn’t really solve them.’
‘I didn’t know it was possible to come back.’
‘It’s not supposed to be. The Chinese are paranoid about people who return . . .’
‘So how did you do it?’
‘I walked – same as everyone else.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Everything’s dangerous these days.’
Jack had overheard their talk.
‘Tell her what happened to you on the way back, Gunn,’ he said, laconically.
Gunn laughed.
‘No!’
‘What did happen?’ Nancy asked, intrigued by his refusal.
‘Oh – nothing . . .’
‘Please tell me!’
‘If you really want to know I’ll tell you, but you won’t like it.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘Well, I had got all the way over the high passes, I was really worn out – I had been walking for twenty-one days, I had run out of tsampa – you know, barley flour, it’s what we eat – and I was just about ready to lie down on the mountainside when I was arrested by some Chinese soldiers . . .’
‘That’s terrible. How did you convince them to let you go?’
Gunn laughed, a hysterical, almost lunatic laugh, which perplexed Nancy.
‘I didn’t. They threw me in Drongpa jail – it’s a stinking hellhole.’
‘Oh my God – so how did you get out?’
Jack was smiling now, wryly, watching Gunn through narrowed eyes. Gunn grimaced over at him, and then continued.
‘Well, I was desperate. I had almost made it and I was so angry with myself. But I didn’t know what to do. And then I was put in a cell with another old Tibetan guy. He said to me, “If you want to get out then there’s only one thing you can do – get a cigarette and burn your genitals with it.” ’
Nancy screwed up her face in disgust. Was this meant to be a joke? she thought. she looked round at Jack, who was smirking nastily, and said to him:
‘Is this true?’
‘Yes.’
Feeling more than slightly disgusted she managed to muster a question:
‘How on earth would burning your genitals help you escape?’
‘Well, the old man said that if I did it properly, it would look like a very bad case of venereal disease and the prison doctor would probably just kick me out . . .’
Nancy’s face was still screwed up in disgust:
‘Did you do it?’
‘Yes. Of course. I would have tried anything. First I experimented on my hand.’
He held out the back of his hand to her so that she could take a good look at the scars she had noticed earlier. Shiny, puckered skin, each burn forming a horribly neat circle.
‘Yes, horrible,’ said Nancy. Gunn nodded and continued, ‘Then I did what the old man said. It made me very ill, very feverish and there was lots of white pus and boils . . .’
Nancy recoiled from him.
‘I bet there was. And what did the doctor say?’
‘He took one look at me and told the sergeant to release me as I would be dead within a fortnight and it would look bad for him if I died in jail.
’
‘That’s the most vile escape story I’ve ever heard . . .’
Jack was still smirking. ‘Gunn,’ he said. ‘I never realized you could be so charming with women.’
‘I warned her she wouldn’t like it.’
‘I’ll remember next time to heed your warnings,’ said Nancy, smiling grimly.
The three of them relapsed into silence, as the truck continued its juddering course.
40
The climate began to change as they descended from the cold heights of the Tibetan plateau. With it the flora and fauna changed too. As they approached Kongpa, the mountainsides became less stark until by the time they arrived at Bayi, an ugly little town on a river crossing, the forests were abundant all around and the humidity had risen to tropical levels.
The road had deteriorated further. Abandoned trucks lay at the bottom of the gorges, their drivers doomed by a moment of negligence, and Nancy saw that the driver was sweating as he turned the wheel for one merciless bend after another. She felt light-headed, as if any moment they might tilt and fall and fall, for thousands and thousands of feet. It gave her an unpleasant sense of vertigo, to see the sheer drop beneath and the steel carcasses of the crashed trucks. Eventually, the convoy leader pulled over in a clearing by the side of the road and declared the day’s driving to be over. It was almost dark.
They jumped down from the cab. Part of the deal that Gunn had negotiated was that they would get their food with the drivers. And Nancy was pleased to see that soon there was a campfire burning merrily in the middle of the clearing. The lorry drivers were a jovial bunch. Nancy imagined that their lifestyle might be envied by other young Tibetan men. They got to travel and see the rest of Tibet and even China. But although they got paid well by Tibetan standards, they were still very poor.
The food cooked on the fireplace was tsampa, mixed with yak butter, ‘an acquired taste’ as Jack put it, laughing at Nancy as she screwed up her face in disgust. But it was all she had to eat, not having thought to pack provisions – how she would have loved some chocolate or an energy bar. She spooned down the tsampa and drank the water, which tasted of petrol, and drank a few mugs of steaming yak-butter tea, equally unpalatable. Not speaking a word of Tibetan, she was left alone as Jack and Gunn talked to the drivers. She watched them intently, their faces glowing in the orange light of the flames.
It was almost fun, she thought, even though the observation startled her. Fun, if she dismissed the darker thoughts that perplexed her, the sinister whispers from the past. The night was clear, she had never seen so many stars, and the bracing air had a purity she had never before experienced. One of the younger drivers collected up the tin bowls and then the grandfather of the group went round the circle pouring little shots of chang into their empty tea mugs. Nancy took one sip of it and announced that she was going to bed. Jack exchanged words with the driver of their lorry and it was agreed that she could sleep in the cab. The driver led her away, with much raucous applause and laughter from the group and much embarrassment on his part. Nancy was embarrassed to observe that she had been given the most luxurious accommodation available in the camp, though it was little more than a strip of foam mattress and a filthy blanket. By the cab’s interior light she unpacked a pair of thick socks – it was going to be a cold night and there was no heating at all. She pulled out her sleeping bag and as she did so the Oracle fell onto the seat. That made Nancy pause. She wondered if she should consult it, but no questions sprang to mind. Or, rather, she had thousands but they were too confused, her thoughts too garbled, to trouble the Oracle with, she felt. And did she want the answers she might receive anyway? Was Felix Koenig a blinded egotist, wilfully naive in his academic obsessions? Was Anton Herzog simply a madman, his reason destroyed by his origins? She couldn’t imagine how the Oracle would answer such questions.
She leaned across the mattress and carefully laid out her sleeping bag. At that moment there was a knock on the door.
‘Yes?’
‘Is everything OK in there?’ said Jack.
‘Five-star luxury,’ she said. ‘Come in and see what you’re missing out on.’
He put his head round the door, and immediately she saw his eyes turning to the Oracle, lying open on the seat.
‘Am I the only sane person left in Tibet?’ he said, with a weary sigh.
For a second she was embarrassed. He smiled at her as if he had just found her reading a teen romance. ‘You’ll be making decisions on the evidence of your tea leaves next,’ he said.
‘It works,’ Nancy answered firmly. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it myself until I tried it – but it really works – it answers the questions that you ask it.’
‘Sure it does.’ He checked the side pocket of the cab for something.
‘Have you never tried it?’
‘No. It’s just not my kind of thing. Of course Anton told me on numerous occasions how gravely significant it is, and I know most of Asia agrees with him, but I’m staying well out of it . . .’
‘Well, you should try it.’
‘No thanks. I just don’t get it at all. Why would it want to help you? That’s what I don’t understand. It might be actively screwing with your head, answering your questions in such a way as to send you down some crazy path, or to ruin your life absolutely. I just don’t get these people with their optimistic and self-serving belief that all the unknowable forces of the universe are simply trying to help them. Why assume that? I’d imagine it would be more likely quite the reverse.’
‘Krishna said that sometimes it tells you things that you don’t want to hear.’
Jack smiled.
‘Or perhaps you do want to hear them – it’s just that consciously you don’t think you do . . .’
‘Well, even if that were true, it’s still helping you access the power of your unconscious mind.’
‘Or it’s helping you to project your own opinions, conscious or not, onto its bizarre texts. It’s like a feedback loop. And anyway, maybe it’s better to leave the unconscious mind well alone. Maybe there’s a reason all those dark urges are suppressed down there – the last thing you want to do is to dredge them up and let them start to make all the decisions.’
Nancy shut the book.
‘The thing about you is you pretend to be this great man of the world, but really you have a closed mind. You’re almost superstitious, like an old-fashioned redneck not wanting to trust the unknown. You can take the boy out of Oregon, Jack, but can you take Oregon out of the boy?’
That made him laugh. ‘No, you’re right. I’m just a hick. Sure, I’ve travelled more widely than you will ever do, in your East Coast complacency. Sure I’ve bothered to learn just about every damn thing I can about this region. But I’m so glad you’ve come all the way from your little Park Slope enclave, to tell me what a provincial I am. That has really shattered all my illusions.’
‘OK, OK, I’m not saying I’m better than you.’
He grinned at her. She sensed he really didn’t care what she thought of him. Of course he doesn’t, she thought. Why should he?
‘Perhaps we’d better agree to disagree,’ said Nancy, feeling almost affectionate towards this mutable man. He was like the weather, and that made her smile again: blustering and then sunny and then hailing down on you. But it didn’t matter in the end. She didn’t even mind it any more.
‘OK, you’re the boss,’ he said, and she sensed he didn’t really mind it either.
‘Yes, you might remember that more often. The one with the chequebook, remember,’ said Nancy.
He grinned at her. ‘Well, unless the Oracle has a strong view on the matter, I’m going to bed.’ And with that parting shot, Jack nodded to her, and shut the cab door behind him.
Nancy settled down in her sleeping bag but knew she wouldn’t sleep yet. Still, it was pleasant to be lying flat out, after being hunched in a shuddering lorry all day. She thought about what Jack had said, and wondered if there was any truth in it after al
l, if the Oracle was just a way of drawing out unconscious urges, bringing them into the light of day. If that was the case – and it was plausible enough – then why was that intrinsically bad? Better to know your innermost thoughts and fears, than to refuse them, surely? But what if they did overwhelm you? Was that when you became a crazy zealot, a Felix Koenig? A Nazi with a will to power? Or even Anton Herzog? Was that what Jack was talking about?
She put the Oracle on the ledge next to the sleeping bag. She noticed she was handling it gingerly, as if it was a ticking bomb. Lying down again, she tried to think of other things. Tomorrow, if all went well, she would finally set foot in Pemako. And on the way, she would also get to see a functioning gompa, one far away from the scrutiny of the Chinese power base in Lhasa. With these thoughts she whiled away the time – perhaps it was only minutes after all – until sleep overtook her.
41
By six a.m. they were on their way, and the convoy didn’t stop again until they reached the dropping-off point for Bhaka gompa. They disembarked, and stood watching as the convoy roared off down the winding road, casting great plumes of dust behind. Glancing up, Nancy saw that the sky was becoming overcast; it looked as if it would soon start to rain.
They hoisted their packs onto their backs and marched along a steep path that descended the forested hillside in the direction of the Yarlang Tsangpo. A light drizzle began to fall and distant thunder rolled around the great peaks that barred their way into Pemako. The path took them to the point where the river was at its narrowest, a ten-yard-wide stone-sided gorge with the water barrelling along beneath. There they crossed a newly renovated rope bridge, which bounced and swayed as they moved along it, so Nancy was afraid, though she tried to hide it from her companions. Below, the deep green water rushed on, flooding towards what Gunn told her were the celebrated falls of Pemako.