The Lost Goddess

36

“Guilt.”

“Why do you feel so guilty?” Jake gazed at her and shook his head. “Don’t think like that. You didn’t know.”

“If I hadn’t accused Chemda, she wouldn’t have run out of the bar — she wouldn’t have been snatched.” Julia rubbed her face with both hands. “I have two thousand dollars left, nothing to go home to, I have screwed it all up. Let me do this, let me come with you and try… and save her.”

Jake sighed. “But maybe you should at least have rung that guy. The policeman in France?”

“Rouvier.”

“Yes, him.”

“How could I?” Her eyes were bright and sad — and honest. “I’d have had to tell him everything. He’d have got straight in touch with the Thai police. Who would detain you, because you were implicated by the doorman, at the murder scene. Then you’d be stuck in Bangkok.”

It made sense. Jake knew it. He swiveled and squinted through the scratchy plastic of the window.

Julia added: “I’ll call Rouvier when we are safely in China. At some point.”

“Safely?” Jake almost laughed. He didn’t laugh. The Thai Airways jet was banking toward Kunming. The City of Eternal Spring. The capital of Yunnan. Monotonous blocks of housing stretched along a lake; factory chimneys trailed pennants of smoke. Polluting the future.

“She must be a relative, or something.” Julia’s voice was pensive, musing. “I don’t understand how they can be so similar yet different, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. An identical twin would be a girl.”

“Chemda,” said Jake. That’s all he could think about. His lover. Chemda.

And the irony.

All his life he had wanted danger and risk, well, now he had it, but in the most unexpected way: he had the risk and danger of love. You fall in love with someone — you endanger your soul and your happiness. He saw that now. He was a war reporter of the heart. Taking those risks, capturing that… what? That thing. That moment.

Jake turned and regarded Julia. He watched her as she gently placed her hands on her stomach. A protective gesture, like a beautiful quattrocento Madonna in a painting. Shy, yet subtly determined. Destined, yet gracious. He made one more attempt.

“Julia, you know the killer will also be going to Balagezong. To find Fishwick.”

“Yes.”

“So go home?”

“No.”

The plane trundled to a stop at Kunming Airport. Red-and-yellow Chinese flags hung limply from a large arrivals building, in mild sunlight. Chinese script jangled everywhere, with no English translations.

“We’d better run, we need to run, we connect in a few minutes—”

They made it, with six minutes to spare, sweating their way aboard. The next flight was even bumpier. A Dragonair prop, a fragile domestic plane. Half the passengers were red-cheeked, eyes slitted against upland wind, laughing and drunk; half wore furry hats: these were Tibetans, mountain people, businessmen trading timber and yak meat and caterpillar fungus from the Himalayas.

Their destination was Zhongdian, way up in the wilds. Jake stared out at scenery of remorseless ruggedness, vast gorges, abrupt Manhattans of mountains, and then deep, wide, pristine cold lakes, chips of blue crystal embedded in rumpled green baize.

Julia was asleep; a talkative Chinese man in a cheap suit and nylon shoes on Jake’s right was keen to practice his English.

“Only build airport last year!” said the man. “Before build airport take many, many day to go Zhongdian. Five day by truck. Now one hour plane good! It is good, yes. New China!”

The man did a thumbs up at Jake. Then he added: “You American?”

“No. English.”

The Chinese man frowned cheerfully.

“English bad. You sell us many opium. But now we are friends, make money, yes!” He laughed. His laughter was tanged with some rancid alcohol, but it was slightly cheering, amid the unalterable terrors.

Jake had already noted the cheeriness of the Chinese, on the planes, in Kunming Airport, chattering and smiling and smoking and spitting, like nouveau riche Italians with tuberculosis: a whole nation making money, a whole nation winning the lottery of capitalism. There was no sense of cynicism, just wide-eyed amazement at their own good luck.

This was not the menacing Chineseness evinced by the stories of Balagezong and the experiments. And yet this cheerful, friendly, nakedly capitalist China was also the China of the concentration camps, and Tiananmen Square, and Tibet, and the tens of thousands in slave labor, and the live harvesting of organs from prisoners. And what else? What weird surgeries? What weird surgeries right now being done to Chemda, her face sliced open from the nose up, to get at her conscience, to slice out her personality?

Swallowing his overpowering fears, Jake took the chance to show the strange address to the Chinese man. He frowned.

“Ba… la… ge… zong? Hnh.” The man spelled out the syllables audibly and slowly. “Yes. Bala… ge… zong! Shangri La gorge, Sichuan border, I think. Very, very difficult reach, beautiful but much difficult and danger.”

“Why?”

“Big mountains. Road bad. Many… Gra… Gra…”

The man was trying to find or pronounce a word.

“I know how say… not. River ice. Not move.”

“Glacier?”

“Yes! Many. Like Deqen. Deep, deep valley, people no speak any language you know. Danger, danger. See there!”

The Chinese man pointed a gold-ringed finger at the looming landscape as they descended. The greenery of southern Yunnan had given way to higher altitudes, to brown vistas, brown plateaux and gray-bluish lakes and glittering peaks of frosted ice. Jake could see wooden houses and emptiness and strange wooden structures draped with drying fodder and barley sheaves, dotting the cold, sunlit, hardened tawny fields.

“This place Zhongdian — no law, no government till 1960! Not even Tibetan law. No army. Unexplored. And this place”—he stabbed the same beringed finger at the slip of paper—“Balagezong. Even worse! You must be careful… get guide take you. One road only. So danger.”

Zhongdian Airport was an incongruous outpost of angular modernity in the empty Tibetan-Yunnanese plateau: pyramids of glass and steel surrounded by shivering lakes and shallow dun valleys. As soon as the door of the plane opened and the air breezed in, Jake was hit by it: the heart-pumping altitude. They were at 10,000 feet, abutting the true Himalayan plateau. From here it was a level but fifteen-day crow’s flight to Lhasa. The altitude was an insistent pain, he could already feel it in his skull, the headache. His body screaming to adjust, like a car engine burning the wrong fuel.

“Christ,” said Julia.

“We’re at ten thousand feet. Are you OK?”

She smiled, but in a fragile way.

“I spent a summer in the Rockies, as a student. You get used to it. Kinda.”

Jake carried Julia’s bags as well as his own, and he felt like he would collapse with the effort. But they had to endure, they had to find Chemda: right now she could be under the knife, being mentally amputated, truncated, severed.

It might already be too late.

Sharply bright air greeted them at the exit. The parking lot was full of Tibetan families with wide fur hats and cherry-rose cheeks and slope-eyed smiles, squinting in the dazzle of the cold, harsh sun. Jake was reminded of the upland brightness of the Plain of Jars, the contrast of high altitudes and subtropical latitudes. This was even more severe. The sky was a soaring, virginal, Saint Lucy blue.

He saw his mother staring at a stained-glass window. The image was too painful.

A Chinese man with gold teeth and bright red sneakers approached them in the sun-stark parking lot.

“Taxi?”

“We need a hotel?”

“You go hotel, hui!”

“Then we need to go to this place.” Jake gave up on conversation and showed the man the slip of paper, with Balagezong written in Mandarin and in English.

The man frowned.

“But very difficult. Guide. Taxi take Zhongdian. Hotel. Guide maybe help. Difficult.”

The highway from the airport to Zhongdian was empty, apart from a few taxis and farmers’ jeeps and a yak in the middle lane and some very sleek black Mercedes with tinted-black windows, traveling in speedy convoy, all swerving carefully around the yak.

“Government,” said the driver, then he rolled down his window and spat. Ahead of them was the grubby high-altitude city Zhongdian. The Baimang Snow Mountains loomed beyond, absurdly clear in the clear, cold air, a row of somber patriarchs in white churchlike hoods. An inquisition.

The drive was fast.

They entered the concrete laterals of New Zhongdian, a grid of Chinese banks and dusty government offices and PLA troop trucks and running raw rivers that passed under broken concrete bridges. The place had a frontier feel, wild, lawless, full of men in gangsterly dark glasses and Tibetan women in red-and-purple headscarves, stepping over potholes, heading for the Many Wonder supermarket. Cantonese pop music warbled from loudspeakers, deafening entire street corners. Yak shit and noodle packets littered the pavements.

They checked as swiftly as possible into the biggest hotel, seeking anonymity. The hotel boasted a fake lake in an atrium with fake cement storks sitting on fake islands.

No one knew anything about Balagezong. It was as if the place didn’t quite exist, not like real places. Julia packed two small bags for them to take along, as Jake inquired about their destination. But it was useless. No one spoke English, some of the staff didn’t even speak Chinese, just dialects of Tibetan. But then, as they hoisted their bags to step outside, a brisk and small Chinese man arrived at their side with a noiseless smile, and he glanced at the now very creased piece of paper and said in his unexpectedly good English:

“I am the manager of the hotel, it is our pleasant to meet you. I hear you wish to see Balagezong.”

“Yes. As soon as possible.”

“But this is a very, very difficult place to reach. Why don’t you visit Bitahai Lake instead? Jade Dragon Mountains? We have the black-necked cranes here, it is the season.”

“We want to go to Balagezong.”

“But, but it is too difficult.” His smile was bright and determined. “You must need a guide, and such tremendous luck with the weather. I do not know if you can be doing this. It is so far, it is past the heaven villages. Instead you visit the rhododendrons, or day trip to Dali! See Tibetan dancing.”

“We want to go to Balagezong.”

The manager sighed. He shook his head and a faint hint of a scowl crossed his face. Then he tutted.

“So. I will help.” He snapped fingers at a bellboy. “You go to the Lijiang Teahouse — take taxi from here past old town square. Ask for a young man, Tashi. Xie Xie. My boy will help you.” His smile faded and then it was gone. The manager disappeared.

The sun was harsh on the street, so bright it was a painful process to open an eye; simply seeing was painful. Jake put on his sunglasses. Julia did the same. But everything was painful, not just the sun. Walking was painful. The blood in Jake’s veins was pumping; he wheezed. He thought Julia looked unwell. Should he allow her to take these risks? Did he have the right to stop her?

“Come on,” she said as the bellboy waved down a taxi. “Every minute — remember? Every minute matters.”

Jake wasn’t sure he could get used to this: the altitude was like some slow but insidious constriction around his brain, heart, and muscles, as if he were being medievally tortured from the inside, with thumbscrews and gyves. But then he thought of Chemda being dissected and altered on a slab, and he hurried to the cab.

The old town of Zhongdian was a mazy parade of decrepit houses and Yi tribal shops and squawking scarlet parrots outside Tang dynasty pavilions abutting rackety flagstoned plazas, where Naxi women grilled yak-meat kebabs on open braziers; the sun was so bright it made the very darkest shadows even darker — and there in the shadows, by the Lijiang Teahouse, they found Tashi. He was a young Tibetan in jeans, with a rough leather jacket and a plausible manner and dazzling white teeth.

“It will be great difficult, rough, two days, maybe, but I have car. Very, very danger, two hundred dollars. We go now?”

Jake and Julia swapped a glance. Jake took out some more bills. Four hundred dollars.

“Keep us alive. Get us there. Fast.”

Tashi smiled widely.

“We go now.”

An urgent walk down a cobbled road took them past the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party. The big red flag fluttered halfheartedly. Jake stared. Swastikas were inscribed on an ancient Buddhist doorway. Sun symbols. The car was muddy and robust: an old Japanese pickup. They climbed in and rattled out of the last straggles of Zhongdian.

“How long to Balagezong?” said Jake.

“Ten hours. Maybe more. We sleep in house. On way.”

The vastness of the Tibetan plateau engulfed the speeding car. They passed herds of cudding yak and indolent dzo, yak-and-cow crossbreeds. They saw newly built Naxi farmhouses of unseasoned wood, and gatherings of villagers in purple-and-red headscarves sitting in yards under the Chinese Communist flag. Black-necked cranes shimmered off the alpine lakes, flocks of wistful and fragile beauty wintering from the colds of Siberia.

Tashi was laughing as he drove, telling them what he felt about the Chinese.

“Sometimes, before, I get angry about the Chinese, what they do to Tibetans. So now I say fuck the Chinese. And that is what I do. I fuck the Chinese, I fuck Chinese girls in the discos.” He laughed. Then he said, “Why you wan’ go to Balagezong? You are in trouble? No one ever want to go there, not tourist, not Chinese, not Tibetan.”

Jake stayed dumb.

Tashi shrugged and laughed and said, “I do not care. No p’oblem. I used to sleep on a snooker table. I help you. Police arrest me many time, drink, fight!”

Children ran out to stare at the car as they passed through a ramshackle village: children in sheepskins and leather skirts. Then the houses dwindled and some higher brown slopes showed cataracts of snowmelt. The confusion of seasons was unnerving. Spring and winter and summer in one place at one time. The road skirted a blue mineral lake surrounded by an eerie forest draped with green moss.

Then, at last, as the sun died behind the summits, Tashi pulled off the rubbly road into the forecourt of a huge, old wooden Tibetan house, in an entirely electricity-less village, where an old snaggle-toothed crone smiled at the door. This is where they would sleep. They climbed steps above a barn of stored barley and steaming livestock, into the house itself.

A pungent fire of fresh-chopped wood burned beneath a cauldron in the center of the shadowy darkness. Pieces of flattened pig face and racks of yak trotter hung drying from the eaves. Jake saw a portrait of Mao on a poster on one wall. On the opposite wall was a large photo of the Dalai Lama. Thangkas — Buddhist paintings — hung behind protective screens of rippling silk curtains.

Mao stared at him. The Dalai Lama stared at him. The cured flat pig faces hanging from the eaves stared curiously at him with their squashed brown cheeks and lashy little eyes, like the face of someone run over in a cartoon. Jake struggled not to think, obscenely, and upsettingly, of his sister. Why were these thoughts bombarding him? It was surely the witch, the krasue, unnerving him. From afar. But if he was bewitched, he was going to fight it. He had to fight, for Chemda.

Even as he sat here, she could be on the slab, her brain vivisected.

Tashi said, “You are hungry?”

“Yes.”

“The old woman, she is friend of my aunt. She will feed us.”

The request was passed to the woman, who nodded and called in turn to some ponytailed granddaughters, who emerged like petite and nubile genies from the intense darkness. Food was served. The house was filling with Tibetans. The whole family was eating walnuts and boiled broad beans and yak chops and oily cubes of rancid pork fat in sesame.

Tashi wiped his greasy hands on his leather jacket, then said, “OK, I ask about this place. Balagezong.”

He spoke with the woman. She nodded. Then she looked at Jake and Julia and shook her head. An angry sadness lurked in her dark expression.

Tashi explained: “She says it is very bad place? She says do not go. Men with scars live there, dead men live there, I not know what this mean.”

“What?”

“She says death is there. Much death there. Scarred men, ghost there. They live in heaven village. She say do not go.” He repeated her words. “Do not go to heaven villages. Because you will not come back.”