Bible of the Dead

Chapter 44

‘That is Balagezong. We chose it for its remoteness.’

Sovirom Sen was standing besides Jake.

Jake said nothing. He gazed at the wildness of the view.

Sen spoke again:

‘The village of Balagezong is so remote the locals speak their own language. Their own version of Tibetan, barely com prehensible to anyone else. Until we built the dirt roads for the lab, you had to walk five days to reach the gorges. Then another five days to reach the next village. It was perfect for our purposes.’ He sighed. ‘Until recently. At the moment we live and work in pristine isolation – but now they want to put a National Park here. They will demolish the labs, turn them into shops. And then there will be tour buses, guides, bringing people to the most beautiful place in the world. The last frontiers of China. Someone in Beijing wants to make money from the landscape. These days they all want to make money.’ Sen grimaced, and gestured to the left. ‘The mountain next to it is sacred. White Buddha Mountain. Piquant.’

Jake gazed at this imperious summit: the slender yet mighty grey pyramid of stone was delicately striated with snow.

‘Twenty-two thousand feet. The Holy Mountain of Balagezong. Of course, you will no longer feel the holiness. Correct?’

Jake sought inside himself for his reactions, his new and true reactions: and with another jolt of surprise, a reflex inflected with more delight, he sensed that he did feel differently. That cringing awe was gone, the shrivel of feeble smallness, the reverential humiliation of man confronted with the ineffable hugeness of the universe. Gone. Instead Jake surged with species pride. I am me. Alive. I am conscious. Man, noble man, the most noble work of evolution.

‘I feel… different, cleaner. Lighter.’

Sen laughed.

‘Of course you do. You have had a parasite removed, a prion of stupidity. The most poisonous of mental viruses.’

‘I feel, somehow, more free? Maybe blithe is the word.’

‘Absolutely so, Jacob. And you will get used to it. Very quickly. We find that our subjects need only a few hours to adjust, indeed the swiftness of the transformation is remarkable, given the complexity of the neurosurgery. Mister Fishwick is truly a genius, which is why we pay him the salary of a European soccer star. This is, of course, not very Marxist, but we do what we do! The end justifies.’

A Tibetan villager passed close to the terrace, carrying a basket of juniper wood. Jake smiled at the villager, the villager glanced his way, and nodded, with a feudal humility, touching a forefinger to the fold of his purple headscarf, then the peasant walked on along the mountain path, to the lower fields.

Sen continued, ‘Our early operations, our first surgical errors, these were, I accept they were… tragic errors. I am candid enough to confess this. My wife volunteered and I could not stop her, likewise my son-in-law. It was perhaps foolish to try such ambitious surgery with the primitive facilities and incomplete knowledge we had at the time. But we were true communists, as we remain today. Keen and zealous, Jacob – and ardent for perfection. And you cannot make an omelette for the emperor without breaking thousand-year-old eggs. I did my utmost to help those we maimed. I employed Ponlok. Many of our guards are wretched victims of our earlier, botched operations. But the tragedies of my wife and Chemda’s father only fuelled my desire to get it right. I knew the ultimate goal was worth any suffering. And so we learned over the decades by trial and error, and now we have succeeded.’

Jake stepped forward. Hesitantly.

Something else was echoing in Jake’s mind, a lost voice, an absent voice, telling him: something.

Leaving Sen behind he walked down the steps of the terrace onto the path. He followed the route of the peasant for a few seconds, then paused in the hard, high mountain sun.

The spectacular view stretched away beneath him, a precipice fell to the tiered and tile-roofed houses of the heaven villages, maybe a kilometre down; then small enclosures of jasmine and apricot trees; and then the mighty gorges beyond, infinitely deep. Black, subtropical, three kilometres down, a different world. They were surrounded by cliffs and gorges and mighty summits. Maybe the most beautiful place Jake had ever seen.

And yet his reaction to the splendour was calm, less impassioned. He no longer wanted to take photos. He didn’t need to mediate the beauty or the terror, the world was what it was. Not so frightening. Mountains and sun, cliffs and turnip fields. Barefoot women with headscarves crouching in the mud, tugging roots. Jake didn’t care too much. He didn’t care at all.

He didn’t care.

That was the difference, that was the substance of the change. His mind was entirely lucid now, deliciously clear, clear as the air of Balagezong: he could stare across an unclouded landscape at last, to the blue remembered hills.

He saw himself, as a small boy. Running down the road with his sister. This memory was new, this memory was old, this memory had lain locked away inside him for so long – but now all the doors of perception had been slammed open, the firedoors, the barriers he had erected to the truth: they had all been blown away. And he remembered.

Jake was seven and his sister was five and they were running down a street from school and then Becky let go of his hand and she ran into the road and Jake saw again his sister hit by the car, thrown like a gruesome doll, batted casually to the side and broken, blood everywhere, dead. Her body smashed. Blood framed her blonde head and her white eyes rolled and stared.

The heaven villages stared up at Jake; he stared down. He was standing above heaven, superior to heaven. I don’t need you any more.

All this time he had been thinking it was his fault: all this time, somewhere inside him, he had felt the gnawing guilt, without quite knowing why, because he had repressed the memory. But the memory was now presented to him: and he was glad amidst the tragedy.

His sister, his poor sister, she had run into the road and there was nothing he could have done. It all happened in a second. Not his fault.

Energized and heartened, Jake paced back along the yak path to the stupa at the other end of the village. A Tibetan man in chuba and cotton trousers was spinning the glittering brass prayer wheel. He acknowledged the white man with a vacant, smiling shrug; Jake smiled back and sat on the steps of the stupa and gazed at the elegant triangle of the Holy Mountain. White Buddha Mountain. The forests were hanging from the steep grey slopes, catching the mist in their dark green branches.

And here came the second memory, delivered to his feet, small and sad and insignificant. A rabbit returned by a dog. A shot bird, feathers scattering forlornly.

His mother. Jake could remember the chain of events, with new and superb clarity. He had woken in the night, age nine or ten, and seen a face, looming above him: his mother, crying, and whispering in the dark and saying goodbye, and saying Jake I love you I will always love you and kissing him. And then she was gone.

A white face, in the night, the white face of his mother, with the dark tang of wine on her breath – hovering and then gone. The next morning they realized she had left them – abandoned them all. Broken and drunk and unable to bear the grief of Rebecca’s death, she had fled.

Eyes locked on the warm blue skies, Jake seized upon this simple truth. That was why he had dreamed those dreams. Women with white faces and disembodied heads: with their heads detached from their necks, krasues, arps, palanggans, black-tongued kali, it was no witchcraft, it was just a hidden echo, a concealed trigger: these persistent images from the local culture had found a dark and troubling resonance in Jake’s deeply denied memories, his repressed memories, his mother’s white face in the dark in the middle of the night, almost like a dream, saying I love you Jake – and crying and whispering and then leaving, abandoning her living child. His mother was the kinaree, she was the krasue, the nightghost that sucked at him, and yet she wasn’t: there was no such thing.

It had just been a tragedy. It was not his fault. It was just a meaningless tragedy that happened to a piteously small boy – himself.

But now he could understand, and he could cope. The guilt was gone, the darkness was dispelled. He was just a man confronted by meaningless suffering, in a pitiless world.

Meaningless.

Jake stared at the meaningless mountains and the ridiculous stupa and the pointless Tibetan villager. The futility was quite extraordinary. That all of this, all that was visible everywhere: forests and sky and high cirrus clouds and villagers and Chemda on the terrace, and Zhongdian and the cement storks, and Bangkok and England and people everywhere and all the death and suffering, it was all bitterly and blissfully pointless.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. The Zen and withered garden of nothingness. There was no meaning to anything: and in that absence of meaning there was a logical beauty. Of sorts.

Now Jake felt a swaying sensation. And a pain in his head, under the scar, a stinging itch. And he was hungry.

His body needed nutrition, so he marched back to the terrace where they were still waiting for him. Ty and Sen and Chemda and Fishwick were sitting at the wide tables, now laid with Tibetan food.

Chemda’s expression was shocked and sad. Tyrone’s expression was wry and intrigued:

‘So how do you feel, trooper?’

Jake pulled up a chair.

‘I feel OK. Better.’

‘Better?’

‘Better than I have felt… in a long time.’

Tyrone applauded.

‘There, told ya.’

Sovirom Sen nodded with satisfaction. Even the melancholic Fishwick managed a wistful smile.

Only Chemda was unhappy. She reached out a hand and touched Jake’s hand, her sadness was obvious. He gazed at her fingers, with the bitten fingernails.

‘And what do you feel about me?’ she said.

‘Yeah, better,’ Jake said. ‘C’mon, of course, better about you and everything! Hey. Can we have some food, I am starving?’

Tyrone laughed again:

‘Guess you’re truly mended.’

Chemda took her hand away from Jake’s. He didn’t care, his stomach was protesting its emptiness. He filled a plate with apples and barley breads and a fat dollop of red goat stew and tomatoes in oil and mustard seeds. And he ate, lustily and hungrily, chasing his food with slugs of barley beer, and salted tea from big mugs.

The food was bizarre and it was delicious: he had never had a finer meal. He was free. Jake was a free man.

His stomach was filling in a gratifying way. Clanking a glass of barley beer with Tyrone he sank another swallow of beer, while Sen smiled his aloof and satisfied smile, and Fishwick looked discreetly at Chemda who was staring, silent, downcast, at her food.

Jake returned to his celery in sesame, the hard yak cheeses and momo barley dumplings, even as he ignored the shouting. Then he couldn’t ignore it: Cars were pulling up. Shouts and gunfire echoed across the mighty valley.

Shouting? Gunfire?

Jake gazed down from the terrace.

Men were streaming through the village, into the lab, running past the lab. Men with scars.

They were firing their guns in the air, shouting at everyone, blind fury showing on dark faces.

Lucidly frightened, and calmly alarmed, Jake stayed im mobile. More shouts from behind the lab told Jake that they were surrounded and trapped.

Sen was on his feet, yelling. But the men with the scars ignored him, crudely laughing, jeering even.

Jake stared.

In the middle of the gang at the foot of the steps leading to the terrace was Julia. And next to the Canadian woman was… Chemda. Except Chemda was also sitting next to him at the table.

The other Chemda had a gun; she was aiming it at Sen. Her face was calm, determined, and entirely merciless.