After several minutes Shan stood. “I know some Tibetans who have a different way of speaking when they are at these shrines. There are words for addressing old gods that most younger Tibetans don’t even know, special prayers, special prostrations. I felt uncomfortable coming to such places at first, like an outsider or worse, like one of those who had caused the destruction. Then a monk took me to a patch of flowers that were bent beneath some stones fallen from a crumbling altar. He told me to remove the stones and replace them in the altar. When the flowers had straightened he said ‘Now your reverence is mingled with all the reverence that came before, which makes the shrine as much yours as mine.’” Yates searched Shan’s face as if trying to understand, then knelt and restacked a few more mani stones as Shan stepped to the altar under the overhanging ledge.
“This place has nothing to do with my father,” Yates declared, challenge in his voice. “If you think you can trick me into-” His complaint faded as he followed the finger Shan pointed toward the end of the altar. The crucifix was still there, in the dust of the altar, where Shan had left it days earlier.
The American’s hand shot out to grab the silver cross, then hesitated, lingering in the air. There was no question in Yates’s eyes, only a torrent of emotion. When he finally lifted the cross, he cupped it in both hands, as though it might crumble. He brought it out into the sunlight, studying it in silence as he dropped onto the remnants of a stone bench.
“I’ve seen it in a photograph,” he explained in a stunned voice.
“That last year he was at home, when I was two years old, there was a photo taken of me in his arms with my hand wrapped around the chain that held this.” He looked up with an intense gaze, searching the clearing. “I don’t know what it means, finding it here. This could have just been planted here last week.”
“No,” Shan said. “It’s been there for decades. You can see its shape imprinted in the layers of dust. It was there before most of the Yama statues.”
“Impossible,” Yates muttered. But he was arguing with himself, not Shan. He kept turning the cross over and over in his hand, examining every surface, as if expecting it to somehow divulge its secret. And it did speak to him, for after a moment he pointed to a small set of letters inscribed on the reverse of the cross. “SRY,” he declared in a voice that cracked with emotion, pointing the letters out to Shan. “My father’s initials. Samuel was his name.” He fell silent for a long moment. “Tuchaychay,” he said, expressing his gratitude in Tibetan. “I owe you.”
“What you owe me is the truth.”
When Yates did not reply, Shan rose and gestured to the figurines remaining on the altar. “You owe it to them as well. You need to explain to these gods the real reason you came to them as a thief in the night, why one of them was lost over this cliff.” He extended his hand toward Yates, palm open. “Only the truth can be spoken in front of them.”
The American understood. He dropped the crucifix into Shan’s hand, glanced uneasily toward the altar and paced around the clearing in silence, pausing to clean and stack half a dozen more mani stones as Shan waited at the old bench. At last Yates rose and sat before the altar, looking at each of the gods in turn, as if silently greeting them.
“I used to do jigsaw puzzles of medieval paintings with my aunt and uncle who raised me,” Yates began. “Hundreds of pieces with shades of gray and brown, with a few patches of brilliant color. They made sense only if you kept the complete picture in mind as you worked. My father was always like that to me. I had only fragments to work with, and never had an image of the man as a whole. My aunt and uncle would speak of him with the same sound bites, never changing. A good, honest man. A great athlete. A lover of freedom. A fantastic aviator.”
“Not a scientist,” Shan observed.
“Not a scientist,” Yates admitted. “Once I heard my aunt and uncle talking about him with an older cousin. They were angry at him, said he could have come back and had a rich career as a pilot with the airlines. None of that made him alive for me. I wanted to know the sound of his laugh, wanted to know what was in his heart, to know the words he would have used to put me to bed if he had ever returned. They kept secrets about him, I knew that. Once when I was nine they were away and I found a shoebox hidden in their bedroom closet filled with letters and photos. There was a cloth pouch with little rolled up papers, only an inch wide, each tied with strips of leather. I had no clue what they were, just some strange adult thing. They frightened me somehow. They had an Eastern scent, incense I learned later. The paper was different, like it was handmade. The letters were tiny, in tiny handwriting.
“The early letters, the normal letters, were mostly to my mother. They looked like they had never been touched by her. I don’t think they were ever delivered to her, because she divorced my father a year after I was born and my aunt and uncle never spoke to her. I took a few and kept them under my mattress, reading them over and over. He wrote to her about a place called Camp Hale, hidden in some mountains somewhere.
“Whatever he was doing was a big secret. He kept saying it was very important and someday he would explain everything. What he did speak of made it sound like he was a professor. My students have come along faster than anyone expected, he would say, we are finished with our first round of classes and everyone passed with flying colors. But it was a strange kind of school. Sometimes it sounded like he was a student himself, saying he had finished his course in winter survival and was moving on to navigation and language.
“The more I asked, the less my aunt and uncle wanted to talk about him, as if he was some kind of mistake, which meant I must be some kind of mistake. I began to get angry at them. I took the shoebox out of their room and hid it in the attic. I took the cylinders of paper to a secret place I had up on the mountainside above the house and read them all. In them my father wrote about being in the Himalayas, about the wonderful people he was meeting. He drew little pictures in the margins. Some of strange churches with steeples like upside down ice cream cones. Shaggy cows with long horns. I opened another, and another. He asked about me in every note, kept saying the mission was going well. I couldn’t understand any of it. The notes scared me. Finally I got my nerve up and dropped one on the dinner table. My aunt became very angry and wouldn’t answer my questions. She said there was no need to drag up that rotten history. My uncle just became sad. Later he told me that his brother, my father, had sent a note mailed by someone else, from a city in India. In it he said he had found a way to send messages back that would be safe, that he would send bronze statues of a god called Yama, that the people who made them used the hollow compartment inside it to hold prayers and things. When the statue came my uncle was to cut open the base or loosen its solder with heat and he would find letters inside, wrapped up like the prayers that usually went inside. My father said that he was sending them because if something happened to him he wanted his son to know of the good work he was doing, of how important it was for the world. He said he would send a statue every couple of months, because he was allowed to send gifts home but letters were always censored.
“I couldn’t really understand. It seemed like my father was a prisoner in India. I heard my aunt telling someone that my father had become addicted to the drugs grown there and dropped out, then died in some alley in Calcutta. My uncle got angry at my aunt and said my father was no drug addict, just a good soldier.” Yates looked down at the ground for a moment, seeming overwhelmed by his memories. Shan gave the crucifix back to the American, who closed his fist around it and pressed it to his heart.