Shan walked in the darkness without knowing, without seeing, something inside directing him to his quarters long enough to lift a tattered sack from a peg on the wall then taking him up the half-mile path to the ledge above town where he sometimes meditated. He lowered himself to the ground, facing the south, the massive moonlit peaks of the Himalayas glowing along the horizon.
He was a breathing shell. There was nothing left inside but a black emptiness. Everything he had done had been for his son but all his actions had steadily, inexorably condemned Ko to a living death. He was no closer to the killer, no closer to stopping the killing, no closer to understanding the strange drama the Americans had been involved in. He had stirred up Public Security against the villagers and by encouraging the monks to flee from the bus he might have simply ensured their destruction. He gazed with an unfamiliar sense of fear toward Everest, sensing that he was trapped in some tormenting zone where the wrath of the mountain from above overlapped with the wrath of Public Security from below.
He was not aware of willing his hands to move, only watched as they lit a small fire from the wood he kept stored there, then extract a bundle of worn yarrow sticks from the sack. He stared at the throwing sticks, used by generations of his family for meditation on the verses of the Tao, then tried to will himself to start stacking them in piles, to get lost in the ancient ritual, as his father had taught him, to push away all distraction, all torment. But something kept pushing through, past the Tao. Other verses came into his mind, those of the old Chinese poets, as if his father were reaching out to him with a different lesson.
Su tung-po had been a Sung dynasty official who retreated into poetry and Buddhism after being exiled for offending the emperor. A thousand years earlier Su had written a verse about mountains on a wall at the then-ancient Xilin temple. As Shan looked out to the shimmering peaks of the Himalayas he spoke the words, and then, with a catch in his throat, spoke them again. He could hear his father’s voice over his own.
Regarded from one side, an entire range from another, a single peak.
Far, near, high, low, all the peaks different from the others.
If the true face of the mountain cannot be known
It is because the one looking at it is standing in its midst.
He closed his eyes, repeating the words again, and again, very slowly. Eventually they triggered a memory of a day long ago when his father had begun teaching him about the Tao and the poets with the words “Let us speak about the way of the world,” and then another, when they had sat on a rice paddy levee watching winter stars, in violation of the curfew of their reeducation camp. His father had told him of a monk he had known who, in the peculiar blend of Taoism and Buddhism that prevailed in much of China, believed in reincarnation, but both prospectively and retroactively, so that rebirth could be sometime in the past. Shan and his father had lain under the night sky speaking about who in the past they might become, usually settling on hermit scholars or renegade Sung dynasty poets. In prison he had passed many nights lying in the dark, in near starvation, lost in visions of himself and his father in another life.
His father waited for him on the mountainside beside a small comfortable bungalow of wood and stone, completing a painting of intricately detailed bamboo in which a thrush sang. Sipping water from a wooden ladle, the old scholar looked up and gazed expectantly down the misty trail.
Shan reached into his pouch and withdrew a paper and pen.
We are journeying to your Sung house, Father, he wrote. Ko with fresh brushes and I with a basket of lychee nuts. Not long now, until we slip these chains. Keep the tea warm. Xiao Shan, he signed it. Little Shan.
Shan stared at the letter, fighting his recurring guilt over never having written to his father with the full details of his own imprisonment, for fear he would disappoint the old scholar. He lifted the pen again but instead of writing drew a small simple mandala in the margin then folded another sheet of paper as an envelope around the letter and wrote his father’s name. With overlapping sticks he built a small square tower in the fire and laid the letter on it. He watched it burn, watched the glowing ashes rise high up into an oddly gentle breeze and float toward Chomolungma.
After a long time he extracted more paper, this time addressing it with the names of the two Tibetans whose lives he cherished more than his own. He had been sending a letter every week to Gendun and Lokesh, in their hidden hermitage in Lhadrung, and now wrote without thinking, in the Tibetan script they had taught him, of the events of the past ten days, wrote of everything, explaining how first a sherpa, then an American woman, were dead and not dead, playing ongoing roles in the strangest of dramas. He had begun to believe that the mountain goddess was indeed using them, he wrote, though he could not discover her purpose. I have lost the way of finding the truth, he finally inscribed. Teach me again.
He held the letter in his hands, convinced more than ever that the old Tibetans would be aware that he was sending a message, asking them to help him discover the truth across the hundreds of miles that separated them.
But there was no truth, he could hear his friends say, at least none that could ever be spoken, there was only the particular goodness that resonated inside each man, and each man’s form of goodness was as unique as each cloud in the sky.
He sat long after he had burned the second letter, watching the fire dwindle to ashes, driving the world from his mind the way Gendun and Lokesh had taught him. Finally he went to the lip of the high ledge and folded his hands into the diamond of the mind mudra for focus, looking over the sleeping town and the snowcapped sentinels on the horizon. After an hour he found a quiet place within. After another hour he began to let each piece of evidence enter the place, turning it, twisting it, prodding it, looking for and finally finding the one little ember that was smoldering under it all.
Shan was at the entry to the Tingri County People’s Library when it opened, wearing his best clothes, respectfully greeting the Chinese matron who administered the collection, moving to a long row of shelves under the side window. It was a compact, sturdy building, freshly painted and containing a bigger collection than would seem justified by the size of the town, reflecting the largess of the local Party.
The books Shan focused on were all identically bound, all labeled in block gold ideograms Annual Report of the Tingri County Secretariat of the Communist Party of China. He picked up the volumes for the early 1960s and began quickly leafing through them. They consisted almost entirely of pronouncements from Beijing, the only local content being commentary on the evolving campaign against the local landlord class, with lists of assets, down to the number of sheep and yaks. It was a familiar saga, in which local cooperatives, formed from what Beijing termed the peasant class, gradually increased their power over the social structure.
“May I be of assistance?” came an aggrieved voice over his shoulder.
Shan turned to the librarian with a smile. “This early period of socialist assimilation fascinates me. When I was younger I spent days and days in the archives in Beijing.” That much at least was true. “Each region has its own particular version to tell.”