Changazi disappeared into another room and returned wearing a gray Italian cashmere crewneck over his shalwar. Five older men with unkempt beards and damp brown woolen topis cocked on their heads entered and gripped Mortenson’s hand enthusiastically before taking their places on the camping pads. Fifty more Kuardu men filed in and wedged against each other around a plastic tablecloth.
Changazi directed a parade of servants who placed so many dishes in the space between the men that Mortenson had to fold his feet sideways to make room, and still more arrived. Half a dozen roast chickens, radishes and turnips carved into floral rosettes, a mound of biryani, studded with nuts and raisins, cauliflower pakhora fried in herbed batter, and what looked like the better part of a yak, swimming in a stew of chilis and potatoes. Mortenson had never seen so much food in Baltistan, and the dread that he’d been struggling to push down during the jeep ride rose up until he could taste its acidic tang in his throat.
“What are we doing here, Changazi,” he said. “Where are my supplies?”
Changazi piled yak meat on a lavish mound of biryani and set it before Mortenson before he answered. “These are the elders of my village,” he said, motioning to the five wizened men. “Here in Kuardu, I can promise you no arguments. They have already agreed to see that your school is built in our village before winter.”
Mortenson stood up without answering and stepped over the food. He knew how rude it was to refuse this hospitality. And he knew that it was unforgivable to turn his back to the elders in this manner and step over their food with unclean feet, but he had to get outside.
He ran until he’d left Kuardu behind and lunged fiercely up a steep shepherd’s path. He felt the altitude tearing at his chest but he pushed himself harder, running until he felt so light-headed the landscape began to swim. In a clearing overlooking Kuardu, he collapsed, struggling for breath. He hadn’t cried since Christa’s death. But there, alone in a windblown goat pasture, he buried his face in his hands and swabbed furiously at the tears that wouldn’t stop.
When finally he looked up, he saw a dozen young children staring at him from the far side of a mulberry tree. They had brought a herd of goats here to graze. But the sight of a strange Angrezi sitting in the mud sobbing led them to neglect their animals, which wandered away up the hillside. Mortenson stood, brushing off his clothes, and walked toward the children.
He knelt by the oldest, a boy of about eleven. “What… are… you?” the boy said shyly, extending his hand for Mortenson to shake. The boy’s hand disappeared in Mortenson’s grasp. “I am Greg. I am good,” he said.
“I am Greg. I am good,” all of the children repeated as one.
“No, I am Greg. What is your name?” he tried again.
“No, I am Greg. What is your name,” the children repeated, gigging.
Mortenson switched to Balti. “Min takpo Greg. Nga America in.” (“My name is Greg. I come from America.”) “Kiri min takpo in?” (“What is your name?”)
The children clapped their hands, gleeful at understanding the Angrezi.
Mortenson shook each of their hands in turn, as the children introduced themselves. The girls wrapped their hands cautiously in their headscarves before touching the infidel. Then he stood, and with his back at the trunk of the mulberry tree, began to teach. Angrezi, he said, pointing to himself. “Foreigner.”
“Foreigner,” the children shouted in unison. Mortenson pointed to his nose, his hair, his ears and eyes and mouth. At the sound of each unfamiliar term the children exploded in unison, repeating it, before dissolving in laughter.
Half an hour later, when Changazi found him, Mortenson was kneeling with the children, drawing multiplication tables in the dirt with a mulberry branch.
“Doctor Greg. Come down. Come inside. Have some tea. We have much to discuss,” Changazi pleaded.
“We have nothing to discuss until you take me to Korphe,” Mortenson said, never letting his eyes leave the children.
“Korphe is very far. And very dirty. You like these children. Why don’t you build your school right here?
“No,” Mortenson, said, rubbing out the work of an earnest nine-year-old girl with his palm and drawing the correct number. “Six times six is thirty-six.”
“Greg, Sahib, please.”
“Korphe,” Mortenson said. “I have nothing to say to you until then.”
The river was on their right. It boiled over boulders big as houses. Their Land Cruiser bucked and surged as if it were trying to negotiate the coffee-colored rapids, rather than this “road” skirting the north bank of the Braldu.
Akhmalu and Janjungpa had given up at last. They said hasty, defeated farewells and caught a ride on a jeep heading back to Skardu rather than continue chasing Mortenson up the Braldu River Valley. During the eight hours it took the Land Cruiser to reach Korphe, Mortenson had ample time to think. Changazi sprawled against a sack of basmati rice in the back seat with his white wool topi pulled over his eyes and slept through the constant jolting of their progress, or seemed to.
Mortenson felt a note of regret toward Akhmalu. He only wanted the children of his village to have the school that the government of Pakistan had failed to provide. But Mortenson’s anger at Janjungpa and Changazi, at their scheming and dishonesty, spilled over the gratitude he felt for Akhmalu’s months of uncomplaining service at K2 base camp until it became the same disheartening dun color as the surface of this ugliest of rivers.
Perhaps he had been too harsh with these people: The economic disparity between them was simply too great. Could it be that even a partially employed American who lived out of a storage locker could seem like little more than a flashing neon dollar sign to people in the poorest region of one of the world’s poorest countries? He resolved that, should the people of Korphe engage in a tug of war for his wealth, such as it was, he would be more patient. He would hear them all out, eat as many meals as necessary, before insisting that the school should benefit all, rather than enrich the headman Haji Ali, or anyone else.
It had been dark for hours by the time they arrived opposite Korphe. Mortenson jumped out of the jeep and scanned the far riverbank, but he couldn’t tell if anyone was there. At Changazi’s instruction, the driver honked his horn and flashed his headlights. Mortenson stepped into their beam and waved at the blackness until he heard a shout from the south side of the river. The driver turned the jeep so its lights were trained across the water. They spotlit the progress of a small man sitting in a rickety box suspended on a cable over the gorge, pulling himself toward them.
Mortenson recognized Haji Ali’s son Twaha just before he jumped out of the cable car and crashed into him. Twaha wrapped his arms around Mortenson’s waist and squeezed, pressing his head against the American’s chest. He smelled densely of smoke and sweat. When he finally loosened his grip, Twaha looked up at Mortenson, laughing. “Father mine, Haji Ali, say Allah send you back someday. Haji Ali know everything, sir.”
Twaha helped Mortenson fold himself into the cable car. “It was just a box really,” Mortenson says. “Like a big fruit crate held together with a few nails. You pulled yourself along this greasy cable and tried not to think about the creaking sounds it made. Tried not to think about the obvious—if it broke, you’d fall. And if you fell, you were dead.”
Mortenson wheeled himself slowly along the 350-foot cable, which swayed back and forth in the biting wind. He could feel spray in the air. And a hundred feet below, he could hear, but not see, the brute force of the Braldu scouring boulders smooth. Then on a bluff high above the far riverbank, silhouetted by the jeep’s headlights, he saw hundreds of people lined up to greet him. It looked like the entire population of Korphe. And on the far right, at the highest point on the bluff, he saw an unmistakable outline. Standing like he was carved out of granite, his legs planted wide, his broad bearded head balanced like a boulder on his solid shoulders, Haji Ali studied Mortenson’s clumsy progress across the river.
Haji Ali’s granddaughter Jah
an remembers that evening well. “Many climbers make promise to Braldu people and forget them when they find their way home. My grandfather told us many times that Doctor Greg was different. He would come back. But we were surprised to see him again so soon. And I was so surprised to see, once again, his long body. None of the Braldu people look like that. He was very… suprising.”
While Jahan and the rest of Korphe looked on, Haji Ali offered loud praise to Allah for bringing his visitor back safely, then hugged his long body. Mortenson was amazed to see that the head of the man who had loomed so large in his imagination for the last year reached only as high as his chest.
By a roaring fire in Haji Ali’s balti, there in the same spot where Mortenson had once washed up, lost and exhausted, he felt completely at home. He sat happily surrounded by the people he’d been thinking about all the months he’d wasted writing grant proposals and letters and flailing about for a way to come back here with the news that he could keep his promise. He was bursting to tell Haji Ali, but there were formalities of hospitality to which they had to attend.
From some hidden recess in her home, Sakina produced an ancient packet of sugar cookies and presented them to Mortenson on a chipped tray with his butter tea. He broke them into tiny pieces, took one, and passed the tray so they could be shared out to the crowd of Korphe men.
Haji Ali waited until Mortenson had sipped the paiyu cha, then slapped him on the knee, grinning. Cheezaley! He said, exactly as he had the first time Mortenson had come to his home a year earlier, “What the hell?” But Mortenson hadn’t wandered into Korphe lost and emaciated this time. He’d labored for a year to get back to this spot, with this news, and he ached to deliver it.
“I bought everything we need to build a school,” he said in Balti, as he’d been rehearsing. “All the wood, and cement and tools. It’s all in Skardu right now.” He looked at Changazi, who dipped a cookie in his tea, and flush with the moment, he felt affection even for him. He had, after all, after a few detours, brought him here. “I came back to keep my promise,” Mortenson said, looking Haji Ali in the eye. “And I hope we can begin building it soon, Inshallah.”
Haji Ali thrust his hand into his vest pocket, absently worrying his store of ibex jerky. “Doctor Greg,” he said in Balti. “By the most merciful blessings of Allah you have come back to Korphe. I believed you would and said so as often as the wind blows though the Braldu Valley. That’s why we have all discussed the school while you were in America. We want very much a school for Korphe,” Haji Ali said, fastening his eyes on Mortenson’s. “But we have decided. Before the ibex can climb K2, he must learn to cross the river. Before it is possible to build a school, we must build a bridge. This is what Korphe needs now.”
“Zamba?” Mortenson repeated, hoping there was some terrible misunderstanding. The fault must be with his Balti. “A bridge?” he said in English, so there could be no mistake.
“Yes, the big bridge, the stone one,” Twaha said. “So we can carry the school to the Korphe village.”
Mortenson took a long sip of tea, thinking, thinking. He took another.
Chapter 9
The People Have Spoken
All my fellows, why license is not deposed on
the beautiful eyes of a beautiful lady? They fire at men like a bullet.
They cut as surely as the sword.
—graffiti spray-painted on the world’s oldest known Buddhist stone-carving,
in Satpara Valley, Baltistan
SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL Airport was awash with wild-eyed mothers clutching children. It was almost Christmas and thousands of overwrought travelers jostled each other, hurrying toward flights they hoped would deliver them to their families in time. But the level of panic in the stale air was palpable, as inaudible voices echoed through the terminal, announcing delay after delay.
Mortenson walked to baggage claim and waited for his shabby half-filled army duffel bag to appear on the conveyor of overstuffed suitcases. Slinging it over his shoulder, he scanned the crowd hopefully for Marina, as he had upstairs when he’d walked off his flight from Bangkok. But as he held that half smile peculiar to arriving travelers, he couldn’t find her dark hair among the hundreds of heads in the crowd.
They’d spoken four days earlier, on a line whistling with feedback, from a public call office in ‘Pindi, and he was certain she said she planned to meet him at the airport. But the six-minute call he’d booked had been cut before he’d been able to repeat his flight information. He was too worried about money to pay for another call. Mortenson dialed Marina’s number from a kiosk of pay phones and got her answering machine. “Hey, sweetie,” he said, and he could hear the strained cheer in his own voice. “It’s Greg. Merry Christmas. How are you? I miss you. I got into SFO okay so I guess I’ll take BART over to your—”
“Greg,” she said, picking up. “Hey.”
“Hi. Are you okay?” he said. “You sound kind of…”
“Listen,” she said. “We have to talk. Things have changed since you left. Can we talk?”
“Sure,” he said. He could feel the sweat prickling under his arms. It had been three days since his last shower. “I’m coming home,” he said and hung up.
He feared coming home after failing to make any progress on the school. But the thought of Marina and Blaise and Dana had eased his dread on the long transpacific flight. At least, he thought, he was flying toward people he loved, not just away from failure.
He took a bus to the nearest BART station, rode the train, then transferred in San Francisco for a streetcar to the Outer Sunset. He turned Marina’s words on the phone over, worrying them, trying to shake loose any meaning other than the obvious—she was leaving him. Until the conversation from ‘Pindi, he hadn’t called her for months, he realized. But she had to understand that was because he couldn’t afford international calls if he was trying to keep the school on budget, didn’t she? He’d make it up to her. Take Marina and the girls away somewhere with what little remained in his Berkeley bank account.
By the time he arrived in Marina’s neighborhood, two hours had passed and the sun had sunk into the graying Pacific. He walked past blocks of neat stucco houses bedecked with Christmas bulbs, into a stiff sea breeze, then climbed the stairs to her apartment.
Marina swept her door open, gave Mortenson a one-armed hug, then stood in her entryway, pointedly not inviting him in.
“I’m just going to say this,” she said. He waited, his bag still hanging from his shoulder. “I’ve started seeing Mario again.”
“Mario?”
“You know Mario. From UCSF, an anesthesiologist?” Mortenson stood and stared blankly. “My old boyfriend, remember I told you we were…”
Marina kept talking. Presumably she was filling him in on the half dozen times he’d met Mario, the evenings they’d spent together in the ER, but the name meant nothing. He watched her mouth as she spoke. It was her full lips, he decided. They were the most beautiful thing about her. He couldn’t focus on anything they were saying until he heard “so I reserved you a motel room.”
Mortenson turned away while Marina was still talking and walked back out into the teeth of the sea breeze. It had gone fully dark and the duffel bag he’d hardly noticed until then suddenly felt so heavy he wondered if he could carry it another block. Fortunately the red neon sign of the Beach Motel throbbed from the next corner like an open wound requiring immediate attention.
In the cigarette-smelling faux-wood-paneled room, where he was admitted after parting with the last of the cash in his pocket, Mortenson showered, then searched through his duffel bag for a clean T-shirt to sleep in. He settled for the least stained one he could find and fell asleep with the lights and television on.
An hour later, in the midst of blank exhaustion so profound that dreams didn’t come, Mortenson was yanked out of sleep by a pounding on the door. He sat up and looked around the motel room, imagining he was still in Pakistan. But the television was broadcasting words, in En
glish, by someone named Newt Gingrich. And a star-spangled graphic across the screen said something that might have been a foreign language for all the sense Mortenson could make of it: “Minority Whip Touts Republican Takeover.”
Lurching as if the room were bobbing above heavy seas, Mortenson reached the door and pulled it open. Marina was there, wrapped in his favorite yellow Gore-Tex parka. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how I imagined it. Are you okay?” she asked, crushing his coat tight against her chest.
“It’s… I guess… no,” Mortenson said.
“Were you asleep?” Marina asked.
“Yes.”
“Look, I didn’t want it to happen like this. But I had no way to reach you in Pakistan.” It was cold with the door open and Mortenson stood shivering in his underwear.
“I sent you postcards,” he said.
“Telling me all about the price of roofing materials and, oh, how much it cost to rent a truck to Skardu. They were very romantic. You never said anything about us, except to keep pushing back the date you’d be home.”
“When did you start dating Mario?” He forced himself to look away from Marina’s lips and let his gaze settle on her eyes, but thought better of that and jerked his own down. Those, too, were too dangerous.
“That’s not the point,” she said. “I could tell from your postcards that I didn’t exist for you once you left.”
“That’s not true,” Mortenson said, wondering if it was.
“I don’t want you to hate me. You don’t hate me, do you?”
“Not yet,” he said.
Marina uncrossed her arms and sighed. She had a bottle of Baileys liqueur in her right hand. She held it out and Mortenson took it. It looked about half full.
“You’re a great guy, Greg,” Marina said. “Good-bye.”
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