Water Touching Stone

Jakli silently placed her hand on Shan's white knuckles, then slowly pried his fingers and moved his hand away. She rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and traced the tattooed string of numbers with her finger. "I have other friends who survived the gulag," she said with a sigh. "But they always show it on their faces. I have never seen it on your face. You did well."

"No one does well," Shan whispered, looking at the tattoo. Four guards had held him down when he had resisted the ink needle. Finally they had lost patience and held his nose and mouth until he fell unconscious. When he had awakened, the numbers had been completed, and a political officer had been standing over him, gloating. "Wear it proudly," the officer had barked, "it proves the state still cares about you."

Jakli spoke in her Turkic tongue and Fat Mao reached under the seat, then handed her a small medical kit. She extracted a large adhesive bandage, peeled away the backing, and placed it over the tattoo. "There," she said, and rolled down his sleeve. "Just like us now."

Strangely, the coldness began to recede. He recalled her words. Other friends, she had said. As if Shan were a friend too.

The single guard at the small hut by the gate recognized the truck and began to open the gate before they reached the outer wire. They coasted through without stopping, slowing enough for Fat Mao to toss the soldier an apple. A faded ba

Shan's prisoner-eyes took over for a moment. The gate was not well maintained, its hinges loose and rusty. Much of the wire in both the gate and the perimeter fence also appeared rusted. The guard himself was overweight and middle-aged, not one of the crack People's Liberation Army or Public Security troops that controlled hard larbor prisons, and his carbine looked older than the guard himself.

Wangtu would be on trusty duties, Fat Mao explained, since he was only being held for questioning, which meant he would be excused from camp routine to unload the weekly food delivery at the camp warehouse. Jakli pointed to the warehouse, a big square building between the perimeter fence and the i

"Brigade security," Jakli explained. "A small garrison of soldiers remain, but last year the Brigade assumed responsibility for administration of the camp."

Beyond the warehouse Shan saw a huge pile of coal and a small boiler building, marked by a fifty-foot-high smokestack. There were gulag prisons in Xinjiang, Shan knew, that were giant coal mines, where men and women led brutal lives extracting coal with hammer and chisel, providing coal to sister prison facilities and shipping the remainder to eastern cities.

Past the boiler was a cemetery.

After he climbed out, Shan looked back at the long rows of sun-bleached planks that served as markers, with the odd realization that he had not seen a cemetery for years. In Beijing land was too scarce to waste on the dead. Only the most important Party members or the wealthy were granted permanent graves. Others could pay for the right to be interred for a few years, to allow family a chance to visit, but when the contract expired the bodies were dug up and burned. The Buddhists he had known in Tibet still practiced sky burial, leaving the dead for the vultures, the quickest way to return the body to the circle of life.

Suddenly a harsh voice erupted from the loudspeakers arrayed on poles around the compound, a

Past the barracks, at the end of the i

With painful memories he watched as hundreds of grey-clothed prisoners scurried toward their assigned political education classes. No one could be late. A lao jiao inmate did not suffer the deprivations of the gulag prisoner, but discipline was still strict. Shan's eyes drifted back toward the cemetery and studied the long rows of markers. Lao jiao prisoners were typically short-termers, sentenced to a few months or a year. That should mean that few would die during their term.

"They contract contagious diseases sometimes," Jakli said as she followed his gaze. "And two years ago there was a drought. People in the towns got the priority allocation of food. Next in priority were the agricultural enterprises, then the livestock. Then came the prisoners. Older prisoners died of malnutrition. They ate their belts, they ate their shoes, they ate bugs and worms. But they died anyway," she sighed. "And the Brigade sends lao gai prisoners who are too ill to work, just sends them here to die. They hate having underproductive workers lying around the coal mines. Sometimes," she added, "the boot squads bring special prisoners here, because it is so far from anywhere, so secret."

The truck backed toward a large plank building with a loading dock. As it stopped a figure wearing a white shirt and tie emerged from the administrative building and waved a clipboard at them. Jakli gestured Shan toward the cargo bay.

They had agreed in advance that Shan would push the sacks from the top, the position least visible to the guards, handing the sacks to the others until Jakli found a way to take Wangtu aside. PRODUCT OF GUANGDONG PROVINCE, Shan read on the burlap bags as he climbed to the top. It was another of Beijing's cruel jokes. The Tibetans and the Kazakhs, as well as the many other minorities of the western reaches, traditionally ate barley and wheat as their staples. But Beijing arranged for much of the local grain production to be shipped east for livestock feed and exchanged for rice, the staple of the Han Chinese. Explanatory tracts, written by the central government, were distributed among the local populations to demonstrate that rice was healthier. Rice, some even claimed, was what made the Han people smarter than others. An American acquaintance in Beijing had once laughed at Shan for being upset at a poster saying that Rice was the Food of Patriots. Just a marketing slogan, he had said.

From his perch on top of the rice bags Shan surveyed the camp again. He could see the graveyard clearly now, including several mounds of fresh dirt at the far end, and quickly calculated that it contained at least two hundred markers. A new building came into view- a shed for tools, perhaps- located between the boilerhouse and the cemetery. A movement at the side of the shed caught his eyes. As he watched, a figure stepped into view at the corner of the building, and the chill returned to his spine. The figure was a soldier but not one of the lazy, ill-equipped guards that stood at the wire. Even from over fifty yards away Shan recognized the uniform and the swagger. The man was from Public Security, a knob, and the weapon cradled in his arm was not an outdated rifle but a compact submachine gun.