Blue Poppies Read online

  Jamie said: “But he’ll be back, do you see? As soon as he and that Colonel find some soldiers. Once they take Chamdo, they’ll come storming back here like mad things. We all have to leave, we have to be out before they come.”

  He stood and moved to the open door. “Karjen and some of the men are talking ambushes, waiting with their daft old muskets in the rocks upriver. They have no conception . . . This is China they’re up against! Why the hell wasn’t there some defense? Prayer flags, for Christ’s sake! Flags and fires, incense smoke and wind horses, what is that going to do against a million soldiers? That won’t keep you safe!”

  His voice trembled, beginning to crack. Puton looked up at Jamie. He had his back to her, but she glimpsed the muscles of his jaw clenching. He was trying not to gibber with . . . what was it? She wondered. Exasperation? Dismay? Should she feel ashamed or thankful now? Jamie spun around, his boots scrunching the grit of the doorway as he returned to kneel by her. To her amazement, his eyes were radiant even as his face ran with tears. He put his hand out to her cheek. He said: “We’ll get you out, you hear? Just don’t you worry!”

  An hour later, all the village was back at the monastery’s assembly hall. The corpses of the Chinese soldiers had been tossed gaily into the river to bob downstream to perdition. Patches of the floor were wet from a hurried sluicing. The Khampas stood in whispering clumps, brewing their anger, their anxiety and adrenaline. Jamie, in whom the instinct to keep life tidy was normally weak, busied himself a moment in freeing the ping-pong net from the bloodstained tangle into which it had been knocked. In his head there ran: Look after the pennies and the pounds’ll look after themselves . . .

  The doors swung wide and the Abbot entered, flanked by his monks.

  There was instant quiet. Pema Tulku, Twelfth Incarnation of that name, Abbot of Jyeko, moved stiffly across the stone flags, sat on a rug-covered dais at the head of the hall and surveyed his people. They wanted to know what to do, and formed up in front of him expectantly. “So,” he asked them instead, “what will you do now?”

  Out of the surprised silence, Khenpo Nima stepped into the open space. “Blessed Abbot, we have let anger rule our hearts today . . .”

  “Justice!” someone called out. “It was simple Justice!”

  The people stirred, growling their agreement.

  Nima raised his voice. “I do not judge anyone,” he said, “but such an action may not be reversed. You have killed, and the consequences shall not leave you, neither in this life nor the next.”

  “Reverence,” cried Karjen behind him, “don’t tell me to start having regrets, please. When shits from China start pulling Khampa fingernails, I scratch back!”

  The crowd heaved and pressed forward, murmuring their approval. The Abbot, however, said nothing, only observing them all through his bleary but shrewd old eyes. Khenpo Nima, isolated in the center, looked around him. He had never known such viciousness in his friends.

  Wangdu took a step forward. “Khenpo Nima, we know that we are never free from regret. We must regret our previous lives, in which we bound ourselves to this wheel of suffering with wrong actions. But other wheels turn alongside our own, striking us, hurting us. These village people had no choice.”

  “Ah, well put,” said Karjen, pleased that his instincts could be so elegantly dressed.

  At his side, a burly Khampa wool merchant stamped his foot impatiently and shouted: “I may or I may not come to regret killing Chinese—but I’m damn sure I’d have regretted not killing them!”

  Delight boiled over from the men, their bloodlust turning to relieved laughter.

  The women were calmer. “Reverend Wangdu,” said one known better for her market bawdy than her philosophy, “for myself, I have no expectation of blessedness just now. I daresay I shall be lucky to come back as a goose next time around. But what of my children? There are paths in life where the choices are all evil, where we must climb over the rocks to bring our children to safety.”

  Jamie craned his neck to see an ugly, dirty, bloated creature, famous even in Jyeko for the stench of her body.

  Khenpo Nima turned to his abbot. “Blessed Abbot, there may be some here who consider that today we have outplayed the Chinese, that we have beaten them from our doors and done with them. They are wrong: devils do not die, they await their moment. Some here perhaps relish the demons’ return; another chance to lop off their heads. But I say that as you swing the sword of hatred you will strike the little child that stands behind you.”

  “This is unkind, Khenpo Nima,” called Wangdu. “Here are people who fought only to defend their homes and their loved ones.”

  “Justice! Exactly that!” shouted Karjen. At once, the anger boiled over once again; the women shrieked, a man roared, “We’ve settled the score!” and his friends stamped their boots with approval. Khenpo Nima winced.

  “Excuse me . . . Excuse me,” called a voice from the side.

  The room fell quiet. A group of women parted to let Jamie stand forward. He brushed back the hair from his forehead, bashful at addressing not only the whole village but the Abbot too.

  “I just want to say this. I have to leave, you see? I can’t stay, because the Chinese will be coming for me and for the radio. I have to go to India pretty quickly. Now, it’s no business of mine what you people do, and I don’t envy your position. But, may I say, I’ve seen a bit of war, I’ve an idea what armies do. I can tell you, the Chinese are going to be back very soon. And they’ll be very, very angry. You see, it’s not a matter of settling the score. It’ll be more. It’ll be annihilation. They won’t fight fair, they won’t stop short. That Colonel and Captain Duan, they won’t stop till they’ve wiped out Jyeko entirely.”

  “If we can kill twenty, we can kill two hundred!” bellowed Karjen.

  And his allies began a ragged recitation: “Raiding parties! Ambush them in the ravines, trap them in the high passes! They can’t catch Tibetans in the hills! When the bullets are finished, roll rocks on their heads!”

  This last was shouted by a young monk with a flushed face. Khenpo Nima winced again.

  Karjen took a step across the open floor and clapped a grizzled hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “Mr. Jemmy is a British soldier. He will show us how.”

  “But it won’t be two hundred,” said Jamie. “It will be two thousand, and another twenty thousand right behind and airplanes as well. You’ve no idea what you’re up against. You’re brave and splendid people, but you must understand: you’ve killed Chinese soldiers. Now they’re going to kill you.”

  “What are you telling us to do?” called Wangdu sternly.

  “You’ve no choice,” said Jamie. “You have to leave Jyeko.”

  No clamor greeted this, neither rage nor applause—only the dull silence of truth. Khenpo Nima looked to the Abbot. “Only you can advise us,” he said.

  “I can advise, but not instruct,” said the Abbot. “Only your hearts can do that. For myself, the matter is clear. I am the Twelfth Incarnation of Pema Tulku, saint of this monastery. The spiritual health of this holy place is my charge, handed down through long ages. What has taken place here has been so terrible that only in retreat and prayer shall we begin to understand it. We are bound upon the wheel, all together.”

  No one spoke. The old man contemplated his audience with small, watery eyes that, as they lighted on each one, did not leave until they had seen all that there was. So the villagers stood still as he examined them. “I cannot abandon my monastery,” he continued gently. “Many of you will take roads south or west. I shall remain here in prayer.”

  The villagers hung their heads in humility. The floor at their feet still gleamed dully wet where it had been washed. A woman took a scarf from her head, knelt and began to rub the flagstones dry. In a moment, a dozen others had silently joined her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THERE WERE TWO leather trunks in Jamie’s room. They had come from Lhasa covered in oilcloth and lashed over the massive ribs of a yak. The
y’d come stuffed with his warm clothes and personal things. Now they stood open, and Puton laid those clothes in them once again.

  Puton’s pride had never deserted her. She was of Lhasa family, she had grown up within a mile of the Potala. She knew that she was cultivated in ways no Jyeko woman matched. She had never flaunted it, but she was nobody’s serf. So, as she packed Jamie’s belongings, she wondered at herself. He’d not asked her to do it. She was acting like a wife, or a mother, even, packing her boy’s case for his travels. The thought made her smile. She’d packed nothing of her own.

  Her leg was hurting; she sat on the edge of the kang. He had said to her, “We’ll get you out, you hear?” What did that mean? That he was going to take her away? Or send her somewhere? What did he think he could do?

  She considered her years of marriage and widowhood. Had it been her life at all? Hardly a single decision had she made. She had reacted, only reacted, to a stream of circumstance and commands from parents, her husband, her bullying aunts in Lhasa (all now dead), from a monk and now from a lover too. With her injury, she felt this still more intensely: she walked by grace of Khenpo Nima’s skill, she ate by virtue of Jamie’s patronage, and her future would now be decided for her once more.

  She put out her hand to touch the furs on the bed. Had she been so passive? She had embroidered Jamie a scarf and entered this room with it in her hand. Much had followed. She had thrown him looks that had taken him by the throat. She had entranced him: she thought of the intense silence from just beyond the bathroom door. She had been the cause of that silence. If she had not often been the arbiter of things, she had sometimes been the origin.

  But she was not deluded: sexual allure does not amount to self-determination. Indeed, free will does not figure much in the Tibetan Buddhist view of life on earth. Besides, she’d not kept love at bay, she’d soon succumbed. Even as she perched on his bed, her eyes watered happily, her cheeks ached with smiling.

  She asked only the liberty to look on the inevitable with whatever face she chose. In packing her lover’s clothes for his departure, she did no more than anticipate. That small power she did have: she saw what was coming, and always stood to meet it. That was her dignity.

  Puton heard footsteps, took her stick and pushed herself to her feet. She unfixed Jamie’s watercolors from the wall, wriggling free the hardwood slivers poked into the soft plaster. She took the dozen or more sheets, laid them inside the covers of the sketch pad and placed them in the bottom of the second trunk.

  “What are you doing?” he said gently, just behind her.

  “For your journey,” she answered.

  Jamie put out a hand, still amateurish with her, wanting to toy and caress, hardly daring. He touched the side of her head, the thick black hair. “You can leave all this to me,” he began. “You should be packing for yourself, for you and Dechen. We’re leaving at first light. The village is heading for Lhasa, then it’s ten days to the border. We need food for at least two months’ travel. That’s if you want to come . . .”

  She turned searchlight eyes on him. She had no time for empty comfort, bland assurance, ill-considered options. He did his best to face her without cowardice. He felt quite giddy as though, with wolves at his back, he was diving off a cliff into a pool whose depth he could not gauge. He said: “I’d like you to come with me to India.”

  She regarded him with her head cocked and a puzzled frown.

  He had made his leap and was not dashed to pieces yet. He swam a few strokes further. “Would you come? I mean to say, would you stay with me there? You and Dechen? I’m pretty sure I could get telegraphy work there.”

  But she was away through the door, across the front room and out into the darkness. I’ve hit rocks! he said to himself. I’m broken and sunk! Dismayed, mortified, he went after her.

  She was standing just beyond the door in the freezing night. She heard Jamie’s tread behind her but did not move.

  “Is there . . . have I said something I shouldn’t?” he asked timidly, hurt. She remained with her back to him, quite still. “Look, it’s a hell of a thing. I can’t stay here, you can’t either. But we can . . . I want you to come with me.”

  He almost jeered at himself: begging for a family! But, standing there, it thrilled him astonishingly: a turn in his life with which he’d already fallen in love.

  She turned slowly and leaned forward to rest her brow on his shoulder. As the moonlight emerged from the broken cloud, Jamie looked past her head across the frozen yard; the gate stood open. A form appeared there, a shadow stomping in from the street. Jamie knew it was Karjen. The stocky figure stood in the center of the yard, peering scandalized at the two in the soft lamplight on the porch. Never was a silhouette so disapproving. Without a word, Jamie led Puton into the house and shut the door, leaving Karjen in the darkness.

  Khampas and monks were running between their homes, their shops, their monastery, their stores . . . It was the same in every house and yard: arrangements and packing, arguments, panic and stern words, entreaties, loans, quick repairs, the frantic preparations of people for flight. Food and fuel, treasures and thick clothes, cooking pots and currency, prayer wheels and weapons: everything was lashed and bundled, was too heavy, was discarded, argued over, rescued, thrown aside, reloaded . . . In the moonlit lanes, Khenpo Nima overheard the desperation of families abandoning their settled lives for a bitter winter traipse.

  He came to Jamie’s gate and was surprised to find it open. He entered and saw a lamp flicker in a back room across the yard. He heard gruff mutterings: Karjen, in a foul mood, was stuffing his scanty property into saddlebags.

  Khenpo Nima looked again towards the main house. There were lights, but no tumult of preparation. For a moment he wondered where Jamie had gone. Then he heard a woman’s playful shriek, a man laughing.

  A fine snow was floating on the still, deep-frozen air. The crystals were less than powder: just an ice-vapor that settled gently on the yard. Moonlight came down in sheaves. Khenpo Nima sat on a small wooden bench on the porch, pulling his heavy sheepskin coat around his shoulders. He settled down to wait. From within the room behind him, piercing the solid shutters, the sighs and whispers came.

  After a short while, a loud scrape announced that the shutters were being opened. Khenpo Nima stood up, took a step or two back to the edge of the porch and faced the window. A second later, the timbers swung back and Nima found himself face to face with Jamie, naked under a sheepskin wrap. The latter’s face switched from intoxication to astonishment.

  “Nima! Jesus!”

  In the glowing room behind, Puton lay in an awkward curl on the bed, her head on a fat bolster of plain cotton. The kang beneath her was alight, the room warm. The furs were tumbled across her middle, tresses of black hair pouring over black nipples set on dark breasts. Khenpo Nima was dumbfounded: he had been blind to her. This woman whom he’d regarded as a poor despised cripple meriting his pity and nurture, she was a beauty. The wearying, fearful years had departed from her, her demeanor now that of joyful youth. Puton gazed towards Jamie at the window— then saw Khenpo Nima regarding her from the darkness outside. In fright, she pulled the covers up to her neck.

  “There are some arrangements, Jamie,” said Khenpo Nima, remembering himself. “We have little time.”

  “Oh, there are so! Heavens! Look, don’t stand there in the snow . . .”

  With a glance towards Puton he shut the window, seized a pair of trousers and rushed to let Khenpo Nima into the front room. Jamie’s face was flushed with an excitement that threatened to ignite the rugs around him.

  “Pemba Tsering will bring you two mules later tonight,” said Nima. “No one is in their beds, you see. And we shall have a yak ready in the morning for the radio.”

  “I’ll need at least one more animal, I’m afraid,” said Jamie. From the bedroom door came the sounds of Puton dressing and finding her stick. “They’re coming with me to India. They’re my family now, Nima. I’m not leaving them.”r />
  Khenpo Nima looked at him carefully, as Puton appeared in the doorway, her modesty restored. She stood facing Khenpo Nima. He saw in her look a strange wistfulness, neither thanks nor reproach, but: This path you set me on: where does it end?

  “Are you able to travel?” asked Khenpo Nima quietly.

  “Of course,” said Puton.

  “Oh, good . . .” began Khenpo Nima.

  But Jamie had already rushed out past him, yelling “Karjen! Karjen!” The surly brigand emerged from his room to be greeted by Jamie waving his arms and calling twenty instructions all at once.

  Khenpo Nima came into the yard and looked back one last time at the house. Through the front door he could see Puton sitting. She was quite still, not stirring. She held up her head proudly, but her look was on the middle distance, half smiling, as though taking a last fond view of a dream.

  At dawn, a sickly gray light entered the valley. At the edge of the village, a crowd gathered: villagers, mules, yaks and ponies. All were sagging under their loads; the men moved purposefully among the pack animals, lashing and tightening, heaving and straightening. The women gathered up their children, seating some on yaks to cling to the thick hair, or tucking babies inside their own coats.

  Nearby, the gates of Jamie’s house stood open. Jamie was saddling ponies. Karjen was there, more taciturn than ever, settling the radio case and the pedal generator onto a huge yak with a ring of twisted juniper through its nose. Two other village men had volunteered to help: they were caravan- bashis, regular traders with spare tents. As Jamie worked, he saw from the corner of his eye that a knot of people now stood at the margins of the crowd, observing him. Perhaps two dozen villagers, in spite of all urgings and pleadings, had elected to stay with their homes and their abbot. Mostly they were old or infirm. One or two grasped their long muskets with antelope-horn rests as though resolved to hold the bridge against all China.