400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  Zhogmi pulled the man’s bloodied hand away from his shoulder; the skin was gouged, but the wound looked minor. “How did this happen?”

  “A stray bullet—it’s nothing.”

  Gesturing to one gunman to follow, Zhogmi headed toward the central hall. “Are they still resisting?” he asked Jing Meng-Chen.

  “Still?”

  Beyond a row of columns, they came into a vast room where the smell and smoke of incense were inseparable from those of gunpowder. Several dozen monks lay prostrate, bald heads covered with their hands, trembling and whimpering. Zhogmi’s men stood over them.

  “Good,” Zhogmi told them. “Did any run off?”

  “One tried.” A lone monk sprawled in a corner; it was hard to tell where his maroon robes ended and the blood began. Zhogmi crossed the room to a hallway beyond it. There were small, dark alcoves here, plenty of hiding places. He indicated that his gunman should follow the corridor to the right; he went to the left with Jing Meng-Chen.

  “Jowo Tenzin ran this way when the shooting started,” he said quietly. “I'm not sure I trust him.”

  “He is not to be feared,” said Jing Meng-Chen. “At worst a coward.”

  “A coward in his position can do much harm.”

  Someone stepped into the corridor ahead of them—a man too wiry and small to be Jowo Tenzin. He carried a long dagger cocked in one hand, red wetness gleaming at the tip.

  Zhogmi ducked sideways and fired a single shot. The figure slumped back through a doorway, letting out a wheezing cry. Jing Meng-Chen shouted and ran past Zhogmi, through the door.

  “Careful!” Zhogmi cautioned, fearing that he had only wounded the assassin. He crept to the threshold and saw on the floor, by the light of a weak electric lamp, the object he’d mistaken for a dagger.

  It was a paintbrush.

  Inside the chamber, Jing Meng-Chen knelt beside the wounded man. The wall behind him was streaked with red—some of it carefully applied in the outline of a large figure, but the rest sloppily dashed and smeared and dripping. A red streak showed where the man had slid against the wall as he died. He was small and slender, with gray hair and delicate hands that had just stopped trembling.

  Jing Meng-Chen turned toward Zhogmi Chhodak, his face unreadable. Zhogmi did not know what to say; but he need not explain himself. Any accident in these circumstances was excusable.

  At that moment, Jowo Tenzin pressed into the chamber. “What happened here? What—oh my! Oh no!”

  Tenzin rushed to the frail old man, cradling him in his arms. Jing Meng-Chen backed away and bowed slightly to Zhogmi before announcing in a neutral tone, “He’s dead.”

  Tenzin cried, “Why Gyatso Samphel? What did he do?”

  “He attacked Zhogmi Chhodak,” Jing Meng-Chen said sharply. Zhogmi shifted uncomfortably, despite being grateful for the support.

  “Attacked? I—I don’t believe it. He never would have hurt a soul.”

  “Perhaps we came too near his precious mural. You knew Gyatso Samphel. If he thought his maiden goddess was in danger, nothing would stop him from protecting her.”

  Zhogmi looked at the wall with new interest. It was ancient stone, part of the original temple, the surface chipped and shattered. Traces of faded tints lingered among dabs of bright new color—mostly red—that had been so recently applied. The form of a maiden might have been taking shape there, but the lines were so vague and incomplete that he could hardly imagine her.

  Tenzin went back to ministering hopelessly over the corpse. “This is terrible,” he kept saying. “Terrible.”

  “We should get the bodies out of the temple,” said Jing Meng-Chen. “It will be best to dispose of them somewhere away from the village.” Zhogmi was glad for the young man’s efficiency. He felt that he could safely surrender this task to him.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I am unfamiliar with the area . . .”

  “Leave it to me, sir. I would be pleased to see this through.”

  Tenzin gave his DMC associate a look of utter horror. It was enough to convince Zhogmi that he had found himself a trustworthy aide.

  Zhogmi went back to the central hall, where the monks still lay in abject surrender on the stone flags.

  “The Shining Hill monastery is clearly the proper focus for our investigations,” he announced to them and to his men. “We will relocate from the village this afternoon and make our base here. All restoration work is hereby suspended until a full investigation has been concluded and approved by the United Front Work Department. I notice that Shining Hill is particularly rocky; once broken down to the proper size, the stones should make excellent material for roadbeds. I will distribute work orders for all monks, provided they can prove that they did not participate in this act of counterrevolution.”

  There was no response, but he did not expect one. His men went to work with their usual efficiency, rounding up the monks. They ordinarily lived in cramped dormitories and shabby little outbuildings clustered on the hillside behind the temple; but until a system for monitoring them could be established, he ordered they be kept in the central hall for easy observation. Many of the TAR’s major monasteries were overseen by two or more army contingents. On a tour he’d taken of the Ganden monastery near Lhasa, he had passed through three checkpoints where pilgrims were identified and searched while approaching the monastery; the monks themselves required passes from the DMC in order to leave the grounds, and were always thoroughly searched before reentering. Given the primitive local conditions and the size of his force, Zhogmi could only dream of establishing such order—but it was something to aim for.

  It felt good to cut through the administrative nonsense and take direct action. He was finally making his presence felt. Last night, wading through paperwork—confused ledgers and bank statements—he had nearly despaired of achieving anything here. But now it looked as if this would not be a wasted assignment after all.

  Only one thing still troubled him: the memory of a small man darting out with a blade that had magically transformed into a paintbrush.

  If he kept his mind clean and clear, his principles firmly in sight, then he need feel no pangs of conscience. What good was the old man’s mural, after all? It had no value, no purpose except to reinforce religious thinking. An aura of superstition clung to this place, like the soot of incense that smudged the temple’s walls. He must not let it cloud his thoughts.

  Zhogmi strode down the steps of the temple, keeping his eyes away from the speckled trails in the dust where things recently had been dragged out of sight. He looked out over the quiet valley and took a deep breath. There was never enough air at this altitude to fill his lungs. At least his sharp headaches had ceased to come so frequently; he supposed he was finally acclimating, though he didn’t like the reminder that his ancestors had dwelt on this high plain, their blood adapted to absorb greater concentrations of oxygen than those of sea-level inhabitants. Biologically, he supposed he should have felt at home in Tibet. If he did well in his post—as he intended—the Religious Affairs Bureau would station him here indefinitely. He hated that thought, but hated even more the idea of being in conflict with his duty. He must strive to be at peace with himself. With sufficient promotion, he might one day return to a centralized post, a position of power in Beijing.

  He walked around the side of the temple, looking up toward Shining Hill. As the day warmed toward noon, it looked like simply another bare Tibetan slope, a treeless mound, and the monastery merely a heap of ugly slabs and broken rock with tattered prayer flags flying.

  Something else was flying, he noticed. Dark specks circled near the peak of Shining Hill.

  Vultures.

  II

  On the far side of Shining Hill, just below the crest, lay a broad slab of brown-stained granite where Jing Meng-Chen worked quietly and quickly with a sharp curved knife, cutting deftly through tendon and muscle, ripping cords of sinew, twisting bone from meat. A woman’s thin brown arm came loose from her shoulder; h
e laid it on the rock beside its twin, then started in on the legs. While he worked, he whispered the few words of the Bardo Thodol—The Liberation Through Hearing—that he remembered, wondering if the woman’s spirit could hear him, wondering if she saw the vultures that circled overhead and waited just out of reach on the flat rock that formed their table. Toward the edges of the rock, some were already feeding. Broad-winged shadows crossed over him again and again as he worked, stitching patterns on the stone that were, in their own dark way, reassuring. Some things, at least, had not changed; some traditions, when disguised as necessary surreptition, could still be carried out. The elaborate rites of the Bardo Thodol were well on their way to being forgotten, but the vultures would never lapse in the duty nature had given them.

  Five more bodies lay in a row on the rock behind him. He had sent away Zhogmi Chhodak’s men when they’d finished carrying the bodies up to the rock, and they had been eager to leave when they saw what he intended. And Jing was grateful to be alone, to mourn in his own fashion, as he cleanly cut the lines that had attached him to these lives.

  As he worked, he gathered small identifying articles from each victim—a turquoise ring, a string of mani beads—which he would give to their families later. Only Gyatso Samphel, whose body was the last in line, had no living relative. Jing Meng-Chen had been closest of any to the old artist.

  Jing Meng-Chen was not Chinese; his Tibetan name—the name his parents had given him—was Dorje Wangdu. His family had lived near Shining Hill for generations, following old ways of life, with some of their sons joining the monastery, some daughters going to the nunnery, which survived only as a bomb-blasted heap down in a cleft of the hill below the table rock. Most of his ancestors had been trained in the necessary rites of sky burial. It was the rock of the Vulture Maiden.

  Shining Hill had for ages been known as the “Shining Hill of the Vulture Maiden,” but that name had been considered too unsavory by communist officials when they came through with their maps seeking likely tourist sites, applying new Chinese names to places that already had ancient Tibetan ones. The Vulture Maiden was a revered local deity, an ancient goddess traditionally associated with this peak, this specific rock. The early Bonpo sorcerers had appeased her with magic and traded offerings for her favors. The great Indian saint Padmasambhava had challenged her to a magical battle on the condition that if he defeated her, then she must become a defender of Buddhism. The Vulture Maiden, failing to injure him, had become a ferocious protector of the faith. Today her powers were more spiritual than temporal, but it had not always been so, according to the stories old Gyatso Samphel had told Jing Meng-Chen when he was a boy:

  “Many hundreds of years ago, a band of Mongol brigands attacked our village,” the old artist had once told him. “They plundered the stores, then assaulted the nunnery on Shining Hill. There was no monastery in those days. The Vulture Maiden was worshiped there by twelve nuns. In fact, her incarnation dwelt among them as a beautiful girl. It was she who met the marauders as they rode over Shining Hill. The chief robber was stunned at the sight of her, not knowing that she was a goddess, thinking her nothing but a lovely maiden. He vowed that if she willingly surrendered herself and became his bride, he would spare the other nuns. She agreed in order to spare her sisters suffering, but of course he was lying. No sooner had he put her on his horse than the chief robber ordered his men to take the nunnery. The Vulture Maiden rose straight up in the air, huge wings appearing from her shoulders, and into the nunnery she flew, locking the gate behind her. The furious robbers set fire to the building—which in those days was made of wood. As the smoke and flames began to rise, cries came from inside the nunnery, but gradually these cries became hoarse and strange, until finally the roof collapsed in an explosion of sparks and clouds of smoke. At that moment the brigands saw thirteen huge vultures rising from the pyre, circling into the sky. The Vulture Maiden, you see, had reverted to her proper form, and taken her devotees with her. And since that day, the vultures have watched over Shining Hill.”

  “What of the robbers?” Jing Meng-Chen had asked.

  “Ah, they fled the wrath of the Vulture Maiden, but they couldn’t run fast or far enough. Eventually, unable to eat or sleep for fright, they toppled from their horses and died where they fell. And then . . . they were eaten by the nuns!”

  Today, as Jing Meng-Chen worked, there were substantially more than thirteen vultures in view; it was as if they had come from all over the mountains to this offering. They were all shaggy, weather-beaten birds; any one of them looked ancient enough to be one of the original thirteen. But which, he wondered, was the Vulture Maiden? Gyatso Samphel had said she could take any form—that, in fact, the beautiful maiden and the hideous bird were really the same thing . . . for the dead, when offered up in a sky burial, perceived the vultures as beautiful women coming to carry them to heaven.

  Jing Meng-Chen hoped that these innocent dead, villagers and monks, might find some beauty in their last sight of earth. They had seen such ugliness in recent decades. If only the Vulture Maiden had turned them all into vultures when the occupying armies flooded into Tibet; when, instead of one nunnery, thousands were destroyed. As vultures, they could have circled above their land, screeching out the vanity of conquest, reminding the Chinese that one day they would stagger and fall, and the waiting birds descend.

  But no miracles had aided Tibet in recent years. The Vulture Maiden and the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, the dakinis and spirits of water and rock and sky, all had stood helpless before the weapons and overpowering numbers of the Red Chinese army. In the late 1950s and into the early ‘60s, the crushing might of the mainland had been brought to bear on the peaceful, unprotected people of Tibet. Their ragtag army, equipped with ancient muskets and rifles that they were scarcely trained to use, fell quickly. The physical devastation of war and occupation was horrible, but even worse was the constant psychic torture.

  Shining Hill was far removed from the centers of fighting. Dorje had been a toddler when the troubles first reached his village, though there had been a Chinese prefect in the region for several years, his authority nominal and his attempts at enforcement halfhearted. Then one day a cadre of enthusiastic young Communists had arrived to commence the village’s reeducation. For a time the populace had grudgingly conceded to the demands of the cadre and learned to spout socialist maxims; but they soon grew to hate and resist the fanatical lessons, which were full of attacks on their beliefs and traditions, undermining their cultural identity. The core of this resistance came to be located in Shining Hill monastery, a huge and sprawling brother to the smaller but thriving nunnery on the far side of the hill. The monastery was a village in itself, patrolled by gangs of vigilant dob-dob, or fighting monks, who for years, though studying side by side, had fought for narrow margins of advantage within the monastery. With the arrival of the Chinese, the gangs had joined as allies. It was they who launched the first and last open demonstration against Chinese rule . . .

  Little Dorje Wangdu had heard the thunder from Shining Hill and seen the plumes of smoke and dust. He joined his family in running to witness the battle. The monks had slings and stones and a few old rifles, but raking machine-gun fire kept them from the ramparts of their best-defended buildings, and cannon soon blasted even the thickest walls into rubble. The weapons of the army formed an impenetrable wall below the monastery, keeping back the villagers; no one could have ventured into that field without being crushed. The people watched in helpless horror. Occasionally, chips of shattered stone, flung by the fury of an explosion, stung their faces. For Dorje Wangdu, the sight itself was a cruel shard that buried itself in his brain, never to be dislodged.

  Nor were the months that followed any easier to forget. The vultures stayed thick as snow clouds over Shining Hill. His father and older brother spent days dragging bodies from the ruined monastery and nunnery, taking them to the rock table, doing their accustomed work. They came home in shock, their faces stretched taut by a grie
f they dared not show before the soldiers for fear of being punished as sympathizers. For the eyes of authority, they wore masks of stone—visages hewn from the bedrock of their rage and sorrow. They managed to look neutral, even obedient. Jing Meng-Chen had molded his own features in their likeness, and the imitation of obedience had served him well ever since.

  One terrible night, leaders of the cadre had come to rouse Dorje’s family for an emergency thamzing, or struggle session. These were regular features of village life under the cadre, but never had Dorje’s family been the target of the session—and never had the child himself been forced along. He was scarcely old enough to understand when his parents were accused of conspiring with monks and nuns to read from the forbidden Bardo Thodol while performing sky burials; there were other charges he did not understand. Some accusations, his parents and brother denied; others, they silently accepted. The villagers were forced to join in the accusations, to criticize the family’s betrayal of socialist principles. Many were in tears as they stammered out condemnations at the cadre leader’s prompting. Finally Dorje’s father flew into a rage, screaming at his old friends and companions, demanding they stand up to the Chinese and fight as the monks had done.

  The meeting hall grew quiet. Jing Meng-Chen still remembered the fear Dorje Wangdu had felt in that silence, and the way the cadre leader had smiled very patiently, as if he understood everything; he still remembered how the cadre leader had taken out his gun and knelt beside him, whispering very soothingly to Dorje Wangdu as he fit the shiny gun into the little boy’s fingers.

  At first, Dorje Wangdu did not understand how or why he had come to be the center of attention. The gun glittered very prettily, and it felt cold and heavy in his hand. He had always wanted to hold one, so he did not understand why his parents' faces suddenly filled with dread.

  The cadre leader showed him how to aim the gun, directing the boy’s arm until it pointed at his father. Dorje Wangdu looked into his father’s eyes and saw that they forgave him, but he didn’t know why he should be forgiven, or what he was about to do. Then the cadre leader’s finger gently pressed the boy’s finger, which lay lightly and nervously upon the mysterious trigger. And there was a sound. . . .