The Cloud Maker

Chapter 18

The restaurant was brightly lit and packed with tourists. Waiters in traditional Tibetan dress wound their way around tables serving mo-mos and yak burgers. Misplaced as it was down a dusty side street in Lhasa, it also felt surreally suspended between cultures.

As soon as Luca and Bill stepped into the room, they could hear René. He had a deep, booming voice that was usually accompanied, as it was now, to a string of expletives. A tour operator who had been working in Lhasa for nearly eight years, René, with his stubbled, red face, swollen midriff and crumpled clothes, made it clear how oblivious — or blind — he was to the subtleties of Eastern culture.

Right now he appeared to be delivering a monologue to a meek-looking tourist sitting at one of the tables on the far side of the room. As René’s vast belly quivered only inches away from the man’s face, it looked extremely likely he was regretting having asked a question in the first place. Fragments of the restaurant owner’s impassioned diatribe floated across the room, culminating in René pointing a thick digit directly at the man’s nose and bemoaning ‘every one of the dull-witted layabouts who passes through Lhasa these days’.

Luca started to laugh. Catching sight of him across the room, René did a double-take and then bellowed across the rows of tables: ‘What do you think you’re laughing at, you skinny Englishman?’

The patrons curled their toes and sank lower in their seats, anticipating yet another outburst.

‘At you, you old bastard!’ Luca shouted back as René began to scythe his way through the seated diners, jolting some into their plates and scaring others into hurriedly scraping forward their chairs.

Beaming at them with bloodshot eyes, René pulled them both into a bearlike hug before slapping them on the back several times and herding them over to a table near the rear of the restaurant. Once they were settled with a shot of cheap brandy in front of them, Luca spoke.

‘So how are things going, René? Still battling bureaucracy?’

René rolled his eyes and slugged back the contents of the shot glass.

‘Nothing changes. Nothing ever fucking changes,’ he replied gruffly. ‘The Chinese build and build, but it’s still the same old shit. The agencies refuse to talk to one another, and God forbid they should actually make a decision. If they pass the buck, they take no responsibility. So they always pass the buck.’

He refilled his own small glass, adding a little more to Bill’s and Luca’s, despite the fact that they hadn’t touched their drinks yet.

‘It’s all about keeping you off balance,’ René continued, obviously warming to one of his favourite subjects. ‘They keep you bouncing between agencies, make sure you’re disorientated all the time, so you don’t even know who to ask any more. That’s how they like it.’

‘How do you cope with doing business like that?’ asked Bill.

‘Hah! Business… I don’t know — I really don’t. Sometimes I wish we would all just get kicked out of the country so we could create another Tibet somewhere else.’

Distracted by something, René fell silent for a moment and Luca saw him gaze towards a table in the far corner of the restaurant, raised on a small platform by the window. Two soldiers were seated there in silence, waiting for their food. One of them was strikingly large for a Chinese, his black shirt stretched across a powerful chest; the other was slim-built and almost effeminate, with pale, fine features and oiled black hair. Even across the smoky restaurant, they could see that the smaller of the two men seemed to be eyeing the crowds of people around him disdainfully.

René reached out, catching the arm of one of the waiters scurrying from table to table.

‘Make those two by the window wait for their food, and see to it that they get the wrong order,’ he said.

The waiter blinked in confusion but, knowing enough not to argue with his employer, promptly retreated to the kitchens to relay the order.

Luca shook his head slowly in a mixture of disbelief and admiration. Few people would deliberately tangle with Chinese officers. He put his hand on René’s wrist, speaking quietly.

‘We’re leaving in the next few days for the area east of Makalu and we’ve only got the standard permits. Can you help us out?’

‘Going back to finish off Makalu, eh? I tell you, you boys have got real balls to be climbing those kinds of mountains. Not like most of the tourists round here who bugger off round Kailash for a few days, then go home and write a book about it.’

Grabbing the glass in front of him, René downed the contents and returned it to the table, smacking his lips loudly. He sniffed, switching his gaze to a table of three noisy diners who had evidently just arrived in Tibet. They all had neatly pressed clothes and sharp haircuts, and were laughing to themselves about something the waiter had mispronounced.

‘Hear that, you lot?’ René bellowed across at them. ‘Which one of you fucking idiots is writing a book then?’

As the restaurant fell silent all three of the people at the table looked round, confused by the question. René glowered at them a moment longer, then shaking his jowly, unshaven face he turned back to Bill and Luca again. The dull murmur of the restaurant slowly continued.

‘That should stop them pestering the waiters for a while,’ René said with satisfaction.

Bill looked across at him, wondering how on earth he managed to keep any customers.

‘René,’ Luca reminded him, ‘the permits?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘You know, I’m not even sure which agency to ask any more… the TMA, Foreign Office… who knows? As I said, they try to keep you off-kilter. I did hear something recently, though. One Westerner managed to get permission to go down to the border and do some climbing, and where do you think he got his papers? The Forestry Commission! Can you imagine that? The bloody Forestry Commission.’

He tilted his head back and let out a low groan.

‘I came to Tibet nearly a decade ago as a botanist,’ he continued. ‘In those days the scientists on the other side of the fence would help you out. You know, apply for permits for you and lend a hand. But now… Christ, it’s always such a mess…’

Bill and Luca both remained silent as he trailed off, waiting for René to return to the subject. Eventually, he seemed to remember they were waiting for his advice.

‘Look, if you two are serious about it, you’re just going to have to peel off the standard route to Nepal and head east without anyone knowing. The Tibetans won’t care where you’re going, as long as you keep feeding them enough dollars, and I should be able to cover you from this end.’

‘And if we get caught venturing off without permits?’ broke in Bill.

‘Who’s going to check our permits?’ said Luca, waving his hand impatiently and downing his own shot of brandy. He winced and René looked on approvingly, refilling his glass as he set it back down on the table. ‘We’re going to be halfway up a bloody mountain.’

Bill sat forward in his seat, his voice terse. ‘I think it might be sensible to have an idea of what we’re up against before gallivanting off into a restricted area. And how the hell are we going to shake off the interpreter? They don’t let you leave without one.’

‘We’ll just have to give him the slip. Get up early,’ Luca replied.

‘That’s it, sneak off early? That’s the plan?’ Bill said, shaking his head. ‘You are kidding me, right?’

Luca raised his hands defensively.

‘Come on, Bill, it’s not like we haven’t done worse before. And like he said, René will be able to smooth things over from this end.’ Turning to look at him, Luca saw René lean back in his chair, the glass of brandy clutched loosely in one hand and resting on top of his belly. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’

René seemed to drift reluctantly back to the present. He looked at them with eyes glazed from brandy. ‘You should be all right,’ he said eventually. ‘You’re not going anywhere too politically sensitive. It’s the tour operator who gets all their… attention. I’ll fix up some documents for you and they’ll get you where you need to go.’

They sat for a moment in silence, all appreciating the risk he was taking.

‘You know what I say? Screw ’em. After all the years of this shit, being thrown out would probably be a weight off my mind.’

‘Thank you, René,’ said Luca.

‘Yes, thank you,’ added Bill.

René nodded, signalling that the matter was now closed.

Scraping back his chair, Luca got to his feet.

‘Back in a second,’ he said, winding round the crowded tables and heading for the toilets.

On his way back into the main room, he stopped. The slim Chinese officer from the table by the window was standing in his way, polishing the lenses of his glasses with a cloth held in one hand. He kept the other in one of his pockets.

Luca stood still for a moment, waiting for him to move, and after a few seconds, coughed politely. The man slowly finished wiping the lenses, apparently in no hurry to get out of the way. Finally putting his glasses back on, he turned to look at Luca.

His eyes had unusually wide black pupils which seemed to obscure most of the irises. They made for a curiously blank expression. There was something about the way he stared straight through him that made the back of Luca’s neck tingle.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, using one of his few phrases of Mandarin, and ducked past, shaking his head.

Bill and René were engrossed in conversation when he got back to the table.

‘You really are an ignorant brute, aren’t you?’ René said, smiling at Bill. ‘The swastika is a Buddhist symbol intended to bring good luck. You see it painted on doorways and religious artefacts everywhere around here. Hitler just twisted it round a little, like he did with everything else.’

‘But painted on a human skull?’ Bill asked as Luca shuffled on to the bench seat beside him.

René snorted. ‘Don’t they teach you anything these days? The guys here don’t look at death the same way Westerners do. Think about it. What are the Tibetans supposed to do with dead bodies? Bury them? Hah! You try digging six feet down with the kind of perma-frost they get up here on the plateau. You’d be all fucking day!’

He gulped down another shot of brandy, signalling with his glass for Luca to do the same. Luca hammered it back, shutting his eyes as the taste of the alcohol hit him, and then grinning broadly.

‘And for that matter, you can’t cremate bodies either,’ René continued, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘There are bugger all trees up at this altitude and any decent wood is used for making stuff they need, not stuff they want to get rid of.’ He lowered his voice dramatically. ‘You know what they do instead?’

Both of them shook their heads.

‘They take long knives and slice the bodies into small pieces… bones, cartilage, muscle… everything gets hacked off the corpse. Then they let the vultures pick clean the skeleton and feed the pieces of flesh to the dogs.’

Bill choked on a sip of brandy and then shook his head, turning a little green. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Makes perfect sense to me,’ countered René cheerfully. ‘It’s called a sky burial, which sounds very peaceful and spiritual when, as with everything in Tibet, the reality is a little more bloody. The only bit of refinement about the whole thing is the flowers. It’s one of the few places where you get any decent varieties of Cousinia — gorgeous colours and actually rather rare. Pressed quite a few of them in my time.’ He paused for a second indulgently. ‘Anyway, the upshot is that lots of the leftover body parts get used for tools, musical instruments, all sorts of stuff. The head you saw was probably part of a drum, or possibly a drinking bowl.’

He remained silent for a moment, allowing this gruesome image to sink in.

‘Why not? If it can hold slopping brains in there, it should be able to cope with brandy!’

Nearby, some of the diners put down their knives and forks abruptly. Luca and Bill noticed their squeamish stares and started smiling.

René’s own red face creased into laughter, and before his belly had stopped shaking he was reaching for the brandy again. He held the bottle poised in his hand for a moment, face suddenly serious.

‘Whatever you’re up to this time, boys, good luck to you. If it means taking some risks, I’m willing to back you. Tibet’s a country that needs more people with courage.’ He began to refill their glasses, glancing sideways towards the two officers over by the window. A sudden melancholy tinged his smile. ‘And this is where I find mine!’

Raising their glasses together, they all downed the shot. Luca and Bill winced. René burped dramatically.

‘Just one more thing,’ Luca said, as the heat of the brandy spread through them. ‘What’s a po?’

For a moment René frowned in concentration. Then he scratched the back of his head with his sausage fingers.

‘I’m pretty sure it means monkey,’ he said. ‘Why?’