“That is true but Zamyatin must be stopped,” Christopher said.
“The Bolsheviks are planning to take control of Asia. They will reach out and take each country on their borders. And then they will go further. No-one will be safe. Not even you, not even this place. Zamyatin has come to Tibet to further those ends. If you value your freedom, help me stop him.”
The old man sighed audibly and leaned forward again. The trace of a smile crossed his lips.
“And you,” he said, ‘what will you do when you have stopped him?”
Christopher was unsure. It depended on what Zamyatin was up to. Would he have to stay .. . and turn Zamyatin’s work to the advantage of Britain? Or would stopping Zamyatin be enough? .
“I’ll return home with my son,” he said, acutely conscious of the half-truth. Winterpole had offered him William at a price.
“And what will your people do? Will they leave us alone once the Bolsheviks are defeated?”
“We have no desire to be your masters,” Christopher said.
“We helped the Dalai Lama when he fled the Chinese. When the Chinese were defeated, he was free to go back to Lhasa. We didn’t interfere.”
“But in 1904 you invaded Tibet yourselves. Your armies entered Lhasa. You showed your fist. You interfered directly, more than the Russians have ever interfered in this country. And you rule India. If you can enslave one country, you can enslave another.”
“The Indians are not our slaves,” Christopher protested.
“But they are not free,” said the abbot quietly.
“We do not oppress them.”
“Last year, you massacred hundreds in the Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar. If they rise against you one day, as they did before, as the Russians did against their king, will it be because you wanted to be just and did not act ... or because you were unjust and acted? I want to know.” There was a sharpness in the abbot’s voice now. Christopher wished to see him clearly, but the shadows clung to him tenaciously.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Christopher said. In his own mind, old doubts came soaring in like moths to a flame.
“I think we are sincere. I think we act justly most of the time. Amritsar was a mistake, an error of judgement on the part of the officer commanding the troops that day. It was an aberration.”
“An aberration!” The abbot spoke angrily. His composure had slipped and his voice grown rough.
“Amritsar was inevitable in a country where one race rules a subject race. It was no aberration, no mistake it was a result of years of petty injustices, of arrogance, discrimination, blindness. Amritsar was a symbol of all that is rotten in your Empire. And you come to me with tales of Bolsheviks, you try to frighten me because a single Russian has set foot in these mountains, you tell me your people have no intentions towards Tibet. Do you take me for a fool?”
The old man fell silent. There was a pause, a long pause. As quickly as the anger had come, it went again. Christopher felt the old man’s eyes on him, sharp and probing, yet still sad. When the abbot spoke again, it was in a changed voice.
“You should know better, Wylam-la. You should not be a prey to such foolishness. Were you not brought up to be one with the Indians to eat their food, to breathe their air, to lose your identity in their identity? Weren’t you taught to see the world through their eyes, to listen with their ears, to taste with their tongue? And you talk to me of errors of judgement, you talk to me of aberrations, you talk to me of dead kings? How can you have forgotten what I taught you? How can you have strayed so far from what you once were?”
Christopher felt a deep chill take hold of him. He was afraid. He was dreadfully afraid. His whole body shook with the beginnings of this fear. The shadows shifted about the abbot and his throne, ancient shadows, thin things that moved like hungry ghosts. Lights flickered. The room seemed full of voices whispering to him voices from his past, voices from long ago, voices of the dead. He remembered the crucifix he had found in Cormac’s desk, its sharp edges digging into his flesh.
“Who are you?” Christopher asked in a voice made dry by fear.
The old man came forward into the light. Slowly, the shadows gave up their hold on him. He had dwelt so long in them and they so long in him, but now, for a brief moment, they parted and returned him living to the light. He stood up, a frail old man in saffron robes, and stepped down from the dais on which his throne was set. Slowly, he came towards Christopher, taller than he had appeared seated on the cushions. He came right up to Christopher and knelt down in front of him, his face only inches away from his.
“Who are you?” whispered Christopher again. The fear was a living thing that struggled in him, threshing about in his chest like a caged animal or a bird or a butterfly.
“Don’t you know me, Christopher?” The abbot’s voice was low and gentle. It did not strike Christopher at first that these last words were spoken not in Tibetan but in English.
The world shattered.
“Do you not .. .”
The fragments crumbled to dust and were scattered.
‘.. . remember me .. .”
A wind howled in Christopher’s head. The world was a void filled with the dust of the world that had been. He heard his mother’s voice, calling him:
‘.. . Christopher.”
And his sister’s voice, in the long days of summer, running after him on a sunlit lawn:
‘.. . Christopher.”
And Elizabeth, her arms stretched out in pain, her eyes distended, dying:
‘.. . Christopher.”
And at the end, his father’s voice, in the centre of the void,
reassembling the dust, refashioning the world:
‘.. . Christopher? Don’t you remember me, Christopher?”
They stood by the last of the chortens together. Christopher’s father had opened shutters in the wall so that they could see out across the pass. For a long time, neither man spoke. The sun had moved, and from its new position it carved patterns of light and darkness on dim white peaks and snow-filled gullies. Apart from shadows, nothing moved. The whole world was still and silent.
“That’s Everest,” said the old man suddenly, pointing south and west, as a father will point something out to his child.
“The Tibetans call it Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the Earth.”
He paused while Christopher located the peak to which he had pointed. Fragments of cloud covered all but the last extremity of the great mountain, dwarfed by distance.
“And that’s Makalu,” he answered, pointing a little further south.
“Chamlang, Lhotse you can see them all from here if the air is clear. Sometimes I stand in this spot for hours watching them. I never grow tired of this view. Never. I can still remember the first time I saw it.” He fell silent again, thinking of the past.
Christopher shivered.
“Are you cold?” his father asked.
He nodded and the old man closed the shutter, confining them inside the chorten hall once more.
“This was my last body,” Christopher’s father said, brushing his hand against the burnished metal of the tomb.
“I don’t understand,” said Christopher. Would even two and two make four again, or black and white combine to make grey?
“Surely you understand this much,” his father protested.
“That we put on bodies and take them off again. I have had many bodies.
Soon I shall be getting rid of this one as well. And then it will be time to find another.”
“But you’re my father!” Christopher protested in his turn.
“You died years ago. This isn’t possible.”
“What is possible, Christopher? What is impossible? Can you tell me?