The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison Page A

nibbles.
    Outside, the compound was gripped in a deathly silence. The crisp, chill air was still. The forlorn cry of a solitary nighthawk came from overhead.
    They stopped at the gate, Feng still uncertain. From the rock face came the echo of a tiny ringing, a distant clinking of metal on metal. They listened for a moment and heard another sound; a low metallic rumbling. Feng recognized it first. He pushed Shan through the gate, locked it, and began running toward the barracks. The next stage of the 404th’s punishment was about to begin.
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    Shan offered the remaining
momo
to Choje.
    The lama smiled. “You are working harder than the rest of us. You need your food.”
    â€œI have no appetite.”
    â€œTwenty rosaries for lying,” Choje said good-naturedly and laid the
momo
on the floor, between the altar marks. The
khampa
sprang forward, knelt, and touched his head to the floor. Choje seemed surprised. He nodded, and the
khampa
stuffed the dumpling into his mouth. He rose and bowed to Choje, then squatted by the door. The catlike
khampa
was the new watcher.
    Suddenly Shan realized the other prisoners were not doing their rosaries. They were bent over their bunks, writing on the backs of tally sheets or in the margins of the rare newspapers that were sometimes brought by the Friends Association.A few wrote with the stubs of pencils. Most used pieces of charcoal.
    â€œRinpoche,” Shan said. “They have arrived. By morning they will have taken over from the guards.”
    Choje nodded slowly. “These men—I am sorry, what is the word I hear for the Public Security troops?”
    â€œKnobs.”
    Choje smiled with amusement. “These knobs,” Choje continued, “they are not our problem. They are the problem of the warden.”
    â€œThey have identified the dead man,” Shan announced. Several of the priests looked up. He looked around as he spoke. “His name was Jao Xengding.”
    A sudden, silent chill fell over the hut.
    Choje’s hands made a
mudra.
It was an invocation of the Buddha of Compassion. “I fear for his soul.”
    From the shadows a voice called out. “Let him stay in hell.”
    Choje looked up in censure, then turned back with a sigh. “He will have a difficult passage.”
    Trinle suddenly spoke. “He will be in struggle for his deeds. And for the violence of his death. He could not have been prepared properly.”
    â€œHe sent many to prison,” Shan observed.
    Trinle turned to Shan. “We have to get him off the mountain.”
    Shan opened his mouth to correct his friend, then realized he was not speaking of Jao’s body.
    â€œWe will pray for him,” Choje said. “Until his soul has passed we must pray.”
    Until his soul has passed, Shan reflected, he will continue to punish the 404th.
    A monk brought one of the tally sheets for Choje to examine. He studied it, then spoke in low tones to the man, who took the scrap back to his bunk and began working on it again.
    Choje looked at Shan. “What is it they are doing to you?” He spoke very quietly, so no one heard but Shan.
    In that moment Shan saw Choje as in their first meeting: Shan kneeling in mud, Choje striding across the compound,oblivious to the guards, as serenely as if he were strolling across a meadow to retrieve an injured bird.
    Shan had been in fragments when his jailers first released him into the 404th compound, shattered physically and mentally from three months of interrogation and twenty-four-hour political therapy. Public Security had intercepted him at the end of his last investigation, just as he was about to dispatch a very special report to the State Council instead of his official superior, the Minister of Economy. At first they had simply beaten him, until a Public Security doctor had expressed concern about brain damage. Then they used bamboo splints, but that had built such an inferno of pain he could not hear