Blue Poppies Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE PING-PONG WENT splendidly. Even senior lamas allowed themselves a seemly knock. The novices played so eagerly that the Abbot expressed concern: they were here to pray, to recite and learn, not to whack little balls and shriek. Khenpo Nima apologized hastily and asked Wangdu the Disciplinarian to impose limits. But Wangdu, a stern giant, revealed a boyish liking for the sport himself. One or two of the monks could soon give Jamie a passable game. Sometimes they played Round the Table, with a dozen shaven lads in swathes of maroon careering after each other to seize the paddle in turn.

  Even as they played, traders from China brought word of war, but as the winter deepened into December and the shadows froze, Jyeko felt itself safe. The exhausted, shambolic armies of China would surely not risk the Kham wilderness in winter. Radio Peking gave no clue. But the merchants brought rumors.

  Each morning, Khenpo Nima came and sat with Jamie at the radio table, and sent these rumors flying on to Lhasa. Each day, also, he observed the woman and her girl. Puton worked in the kitchen and pounded Jamie’s clothes on the stone floor of the bathroom. Karjen never spoke to her. Nor did Jamie converse with her much. Still, Nima thought that the Ying-gi-li followed Puton with his eye. Or perhaps Nima just hoped he did.

  The contract was still unsigned.

  Karjen dressed like a nomad, with an oily sheepskin coat, fleece to the inside. Even indoors, he hardly ever removed it. He preferred to slip both arms free and tie the sleeves in a cumbersome bulk around his middle. Winter sun on snow could burn the eyes through the high, thin air of Kham. Karjen wore goggles of leather with a narrow horizontal slit, which gave him the look of a malicious troll. He was a squat, muscular figure with a flat head and a short bristly mustache.

  He was the last survivor of a dynasty of brigands. It was a profession that might have earned him amputated hands, but in the rebellion of 1931, Karjen, his father and brothers had been in the first ranks that stormed the castle at Nyarong, screeching their hatred of all things Chinese. When the gates were forced, a Chinese colonel raised his pistol to shoot Karjen’s father through the head. But the Khampa swung his sword to take off the colonel’s pistol hand, then twirled the blade over and down to remove the other arm as the officer stood in speechless surprise. Finally, with a reverse slice, the warrior decapitated him. The effect of this spectacle on the colonel’s men was that the defense collapsed, and the Lion Standard of Tibet was raised over the castle.

  The Chinese had come back; Lhasa and Peking had settled the matter between them, leaving Kham embittered. The rest of the family had been slaughtered in the defeat. Karjen the brigand, anointed locally as the son of a hero, had been persuaded into more peaceful ways as a factor for the Jyeko monastery. He was hopeless at it, and his duties contracted progressively. Which was how the old patriot now found himself as “houseboy” to a Scottish radio operator.

  He was a most entertaining riding companion. His voice was a wet scrape, like a blunt knife taking the last flesh off a bloody sheepskin. He gobbed and hacked, but his yarns were inexhaustible.

  “See that gully beyond the stream, Mr. Jemmy? We trapped a platoon of Chinese there in thirty-one. My brother Agon climbed up the rocks above. The rest of us blocked their escape and shouted: ‘Chinks! We’re going to feed your bollocks to the lammergeyers! We’re going to string your eyeballs on wire!’They were so scared they retreated right underneath Agon who set off a nice little rock slide and buried the bastards.”

  Karjen’s notions of the religious life were similarly scabrous: “My sainted mother wanted me to be a lama. Can you imagine me as a lama, Mr. Jemmy? I’ll tell you why I said no. I was a rather pretty young lad at the time—it’s true!—and I didn’t fancy being buggered to Nirvana, beg pardon.”

  They had paused by a stream with ice-scalloped margins. “Lovely spot in summer, this,” growled Karjen through his greasy mustache. “Covered in flowers and herbs. You’ll see that Reverend Khenpo Nima out here grubbing around for his cures. Not an ache in your body he can’t put a petal to.”

  In the sun, a small group of grunting yaks sought the last soft grazing. The outside of each grass tussock was frost-blasted, brittle and yellow, so they thrust their noses into the heart. As Jamie watched the huge bulls, he became aware of a soft, coppery ringing in the air behind him, faint but clear.

  “Mr. Jemmy! From Lhasa!”

  Over the low brow of the pass came a procession of ponies, mules and baggage yaks in single file.

  “See the red tassels? Official messengers,” said Karjen.

  They heaved the ponies around and pelted across the stony tract into the village. Small children chased after them through the lanes, squealing, “Jemmy! Jemmy!”

  The State courier, his bridle bedecked with red braids, had paused at Jamie’s gateway.

  “Mr. Jemmy? Your radio oil and some letters. Lhasa’s regards, and where’s your contract? Reverend Khenpo Nima! Humblest greetings to the Abbot . . .”

  As Jamie received the oilcloth packet of mail, Puton was watching from the porch. There were no messages for the widow of Lhasa’s tax collector. Jamie felt her black eyes on him as he came across the yard. He gave her a quick smile, and stepped past into his room.

  Khenpo Nima’s letters had not cheered him at all. The instructions regarding Jyeko town he gave out at once. Then he went to inspect his other problem. Jamie was stomping about his house with a cheery brusqueness that, to Khenpo Nima, rang hollow. “What splendid news from your home, Jemmy?”

  “It’s all months out of date.”

  “Oh,” said Khenpo Nima, thoughtfully. “I am sorry. There is heavy snow in the southern passes, so . . . What is in these old letters?”

  “Family guff, Nima, hatch, match and dispatch.”

  “Something special?”

  “They want me home, actually.” The monk stared at him, fearing the worst. “Dad says I’ve a place secure on the electrical salvage but it won’t wait forever. And Catriona next door all grown up and asking after me.”

  That afternoon, he went out and distributed half a tin of Moffat toffee to the urchins in the street, like a free man.

  Two days later, the afternoon of 1 January 1950, when Khenpo Nima entered the little radio room, Jamie flagged him to silence. The radio glowed soft orange, and hissed. As Jamie touched dials, the hiss swayed deeper, then lighter—but there were no voices. At last he sat back and turned off the apparatus.

  “It’s official. Jesus . . .”

  “What has happened?”

  “Radio Peking. They want Tibet.”

  “What have they said?”

  “A New Year announcement. ‘Tasks for the People’s Liberation Army for 1950: the liberation of Taiwan and Tibet.’That was it.”

  Together, they sat in silence for a moment, staring at the instruments that gleamed in the shaded room like malevolent eyes.

  “Well, come on, Nima—they propose to invade.”

  “Jemmy, they will not come through Jyeko. We are out of the way, we are nothing. Only some safety precautions are necessary,” said Khenpo Nima, in a decided tone.

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “In fact, we have already started in Jyeko. No need to fear. Come upstairs and see.”

  They climbed the tree trunk ladder to the roof of the radio room. Jamie peered about, wondering if perhaps he’d missed the construction of gun emplacements overlooking the bridge.

  “There,” said Nima, pointing, “and on the hillside.”

  All Jamie could see were small plumes of smoke.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “So many prayers. You can see the fires.”

  “Prayers?”

  “So many. You know, I had letters yesterday also. Lhasa has ordered a redoubling of our burnt offerings.”

  Jamie stared at the twists of juniper smoke coming from the distant rocks. Dismayed and embarrassed, he could not look at Khenpo Nima. The monk said, “You think we should do something more?”

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nbsp; “Perhaps you need some rifles. Or to set charges on the bridge. Things like that.”

  “You see, Lord Buddha has taught us . . .”

  “Nima, it’s all right. If you want to defend Tibet with incense, that’s your affair.”

  He rode out of Jyeko by himself. Though the village laughed at his curious posture, Jamie rode well: he’d been the signals officer with a cavalry regiment in Palestine. If there was a constraint now on his bravado, it was one thought: if he should fall and break bones, the nearest decent surgeon was in Calcutta.

  He rode west, making for a rocky spur a mile outside Jyeko. The wind was sharp, unhindered by any forest; the Jyeko valley was bare, at fourteen thousand feet too bleak and blasted for anything to stand tall. He left the pony and scrambled up heaps of frost-split schist to a votive cairn: a squat stack of rock that would endure storms. A broad yellow cloth had been newly tied around the flanks. Twenty feet off rose an old, weathered pole, almost white with sun and the scourings of snow and sand. Between this staff and the cairn a cord was stretched from which hung scores of small white flags block-printed with prayers—“wind horses”—that moved gently in the chill breath of the glaciers. A few yards away, a stone ring enclosed the incense pyre. A steady stream of richly pungent juniper smoke billowed upwards into the freezing blue.

  In the thin air he could see more clearly than hear. Beyond the pass lay an expanse of plains, broken by domed reddish hills, snow-dusted now. There, in summer, the yak and wild ass came for pasture, with griffon vultures on watch on ten-foot wings.

  Then the mountains steadily closed ranks and rose higher, until there was hardly a flat pasture in two hundred miles. The grand massif of central Tibet looked to Jamie like mountains in Heaven, a wall of ice-blue poised lightly above the clouds. A score of peaks draped with steep fans of snow, a thousand white spear-heads pointing skyward. The sun gleamed within the ice like a shining edge on a sharp blade. A throng of air currents drew plumes of ice crystals up the flanks into the clear blue. He saw a russet-breasted lammergeyer glide over the gullies.

  Jamie felt himself extended by the sight, his spirit broadened.

  He looked down at the village, the chain bridge, the barracks in Chinese Sikhang on the far side. Jyeko’s children scampered through the twisting, muddy lanes. There was the monastery, there were the homes where they delighted to call him in, to give him their best meals in their best bowls, to offer him warm furs and to nudge their daughters towards him with outrageously smutty asides, hooting with laughter. He could see houses where they’d taken money from him in migmag, “the war of many eyes,” then fondly let him win some back. Always, they smiled for him. If they laughed, it was never in malice.

  He’d never been so welcome—but he was other: the warmth he’d found did not altogether relax him. Here, he was never quite calm. He thought of a Khampa child he’d seen the previous evening, asleep with its head on its father’s lap. Such sweet capitulation, oblivious of care, would be denied him in Jyeko. He would be watched, allowed for, set aside. Every day there was an undercurrent of anxiety that made him long for that sleep.

  Yet, as he recalled the similar sleep of his own childhood, he frowned. He’d grown up like that: lovingly circumscribed, tenderly constricted. And he’d escaped.

  It was no duty of his to defend Tibet: he was quite clear about that. He’d be out. Not home: somewhere new. And the more he moved on, the lonelier he’d be. He gazed down at Jyeko, longing to embrace it, longing to leave. He took a deep breath and a grip on himself, and rode home.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A SKY-BLUE PAVILION stands in a field outside Jyeko. The monks are busy. They carry yak-wool rugs, brass-ware chased with curlicue dragons, hangings of red silk crowded with black script, braziers and a teakettle, cushions and a dais of cypress wood. The fires are lit and the tent fills with the sweet scent of burning juniper.

  The Jyeko people and their prairie neighbors stream out of the village. Rough herders come with matted hair cut in a fringe above their eyes and nothing but a greasy sheepskin gown and rawhide boots. Townsmen in turbans stride about in noisy geniality, with tobacco pipes and leather snuff pouches, baggy trousers tumbling over their boots. The girls are in their best aprons, red, blue and green, with bright twists of braid about their heads. Market women, out to make a killing, bring baskets of sweetmeats and cakes. Traveling hawkers have dried fruits for the picnic: sweetly acid Nepali apricots and figs from Si-ning-fu, raisins from India and sun-blackened Bhutanese peaches. Children run and shriek among the vendors while babies peep from their parents’ massive coats, their faces puckering against the cold.

  The village grandees ride sedately in gowns of Indian silk over their furs with high red collars and rupees for buttons. Their servants have spread rugs and cushions on the frozen ground. Mounted on mules, well-to-do women are swathed in rainbow tunics, their hands hidden until they blow their noses on their fingers. At their belts hang châtelaines of silver and prettily embroidered cases for their eye shades.

  But all attention is on the young men riding Jyeko’s best ponies. They’re the stars of today’s serious matter: the New Year racing.

  Nothing can happen without the Abbot, and the crowd mills aimlessly in anticipation. Then, at the village margin by Jamie’s house, the procession appears. Khenpo Nima, on foot, leads a piebald Yarkand pony bearing the Abbot in a yellow silk robe and a crescent-shaped miter. Around him flock his novices spinning prayer wheels, and lamas bearing the long copper trumpet that booms its single rumbling note as they march across the stony open ground towards the tent, the village cheering the Abbot to his seat.

  Two figures emerge unnoticed from Jamie’s gate and come hesitantly towards the games field. The woman pushes herself along with a stick in her right hand. Her left hand holds on to a timid little girl, who stays firmly in her shadow.

  Puton has hardly set foot in public since her venture to the market—but the procession, the trumpet and the bells had passed by in the lane. Puton had seen her little girl watching from the open gate, and it was too heartbreaking. Now they have come out, they will see the New Year sports. For her daughter she’ll risk it.

  She moves slowly towards the games field, keeping to the rear of the crowd and behind the Abbot’s tent. The rough ground falls away in front of the pavilion; here the people cluster, chattering, guzzling and expectant. A small space of honor has been cleared for Jamie Wilson who sits on a sheepskin, sketching. A gang of whispering, elbowing urchins stand behind him, peering over his shoulder.

  A bull’s-eye target is suspended in a square frame, with another nearby. A dozen young men on ponies follow a monk who stops them fifty yards away. Each rider carries a short, stiff bow and a quiver of arrows, with a long musket resting across the pommel. The ponies, quick-eyed and rough-haired, wear blankets embroidered in scallops of red and black, with reins of twisted red and white cord and their tails bound in colored tassels. Across the chest hangs a strap of bells. As the ponies trot, a silver ringing fills the icy valley.

  Dechen can see nothing over the heads, so her mother brings her to the left flank of the gathering. Now people notice them and murmur. Puton tenses, avoiding the eyes that scowl at her and her daughter. But her look defies the crowd: So, here I stand: what of it?

  Then a horn blows.

  A single rider kicks his pony into a gallop. They career straight at the two targets, the rider hefting his cumbersome musket. Just twenty feet from the first bull’s-eye, he shoots and hits the white outer ring. A puff of chalky dust spurts out. He slings the gun frantically over his shoulder, grabs at his bow and quiver, is past the second target, then swings around in his saddle and looses an arrow backwards. There is a thrilled scream from the crowd—but the rider canters away in mortification. He’s missed.

  Jamie Wilson sits with a pad of cartridge paper on his knee, watercolors on the ground by him, his pencil moving excitedly over his paper.

  “It is very difficult, do you see, Jemmy?” says K
henpo Nima, crouching by his side. “He must hit both targets.”

  As he speaks, there’s a shriek and a cheer from the crowd: an arrow has almost impaled a spectator.

  “It’s just wonderful.” Jamie smiles. “What’s the prize?”

  “Oh, nothing but honor.” Nima looks around. “I must speak with someone,” he says. Jamie sees Puton toss back her braided hair and there is a flash of silver at her throat: the little charm case she carries on a cord. Jamie asks himself how it is that he’s been looking at her throat so closely. He returns to his drawing.

  Puton sees Khenpo Nima approach and she relaxes.

  “Excellent,” he smiles, “you’ve come. Just the thing.”

  “For Dechen’s sake,” says Puton. “But it was a mistake.”

  A knot of small boys smirk nearby, while youths whisper together, glancing over their shoulders. Khenpo Nima tries to be boisterously encouraging. “Ah, it was the wisest thing! What can you be thinking?”

  “That I am despised here,” says Puton quietly, “that my daughter is small, that the Chinese are coming.”

  Horsemen rush the targets, their muskets smoke, arrows strike true or patter on the dirt, while one rider simply falls off in dismay. Elsewhere, the best huntsmen are squinting along their matchlocks at a quartz target, while others shoot arrows with hollow heads that fly whistling like frightened birds.

  Nima’s sleeve is tugged: Karjen nods towards some young men by the ponies, pointing at Jamie and at a monk who is just now placing a red silk scarf on a post—the goal of a race.

  “Jemmy,” says Nima, “they are saying, will you ride in the horse race with them?”

  “No, thanks,” answers the artist.

  “Because,” continues Nima, undeterred, “they say that they want an easy victory.”