by Cary Groner
He thought about it. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
She laughed, briefly and quietly. He loved hearing her laugh.
A little evening chill came up off the river. The temple doors opened, and the men brought the body out to the ghat. They built a pyre on the stone, then placed the litter on top and piled more wood around it. Raju and Arati sat on the ground to one side, their arms around each other’s shoulders. One of the men went down to the river and scooped up water in a small silver container. He brought it back up to the body and poured some of the water into its mouth, then flicked the rest over it with his fingers. He pulled the wrap up over Shrestha’s face, struck a match, and lit the straw and kindling all around the body. Smoke curled up into the light, and a cool gust fanned the flames quickly. Within a minute the pyre blazed. The children began to keen. One of the men went over, squatted down behind them, and took them in his arms.
In the firelight, Peter noticed a man sitting cross-legged on the ground nearby—a sadhu, a Hindu mystic. He wore a garland of flowers and had a long graying beard and dreadlocks. His forehead bore three white bands of paint, horizontal, each about the width of a finger.
“Offer him some money to pray for the dead man,” Mina whispered.
Peter went over and placed a couple hundred rupees in front of him, then pointed to the burning figure. The sadhu nodded, very slightly, without looking at him.
An hour later, when the fire had burned down and there was little left but glowing coals and a few fragments of bone, the men indicated that they would finish the night watch and scatter the ashes into the river in the morning. They suggested Peter and Mina take the children home.
Just up the road Peter hailed a tempo, one of the last out at that hour. Raju and Arati began to cry again. Mina and Peter reassured them as best they could, but Peter knew their words sounded as hollow to the kids as they did to him.
They took the children home; then, exhausted, drove Mina’s car back to Peter’s house. They arrived a little after 3:00 A.M. to find a jeep parked in front. Two soldiers waited, one sitting sideways in the rider’s seat, the other standing by the archway to the front gate with one foot against the wall. As Peter and Mina pulled in, a bright orange dot bloomed in front of the standing soldier’s mouth as he sucked on a bidi. He pulled it from his mouth and exhaled the smoke, yellow under the streetlight. He threw the cigarette into the street, pushed himself off the wall, and came toward them.
“Oh, Christ,” said Mina. “I forgot to call my parents.”
“Your parents? You’re thirty-six.”
“I’m thirty-six and unmarried, and living at home,” she said wearily. “In other words, to them I’m still a rebellious teenager.”
Mina’s father, though retired, could still muster up a few troops for private duty if he paid them on the side. They spoke to Mina in Nepali, and it was easy enough to get the gist. The conversation grew heated. Mina turned to Peter in exasperation.
“They insist I ride in the jeep with them, even though my car is right there.”
“Tell them there’s no way I’m letting you get into that jeep, no matter who they work for.”
She repeated this in Nepali. The soldiers got angry, responding forcefully and gesticulating. “They say it is not up to you to allow or not allow anything,” Mina said. “They have orders, and they plan to follow them.”
“This is nuts, Mina.”
She was near tears. “Welcome to my father’s world.”
“Tell them if they take you in the jeep, I’ll follow in your car so you can get to work in the morning. Tell them I have a phone with me. They’ll get the point.”
She spoke to them. “They say your travel plans are your own concern,” she said. “They suggest that you not follow too closely, in case there is some sort of accident that results in your being injured.”
“Tell them I did my residency in Los Angeles, and I’m perfectly capable of sitting six inches off their bumper at eighty miles an hour with a cup of coffee in one hand.”
Mina rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to translate that, Peter. Anyway, how will you get back?”
He took a breath. “I’ll find a tempo, and if there aren’t any, I’ll walk.”
“It will take you the rest of the night.”
“The rest of the night is only three hours.”
The soldiers finally agreed. Peter took Mina in his arms. She pulled away a little.
“My father will hear about this,” she said.
“Good.”
“Are you trying to make trouble for me?”
“Absolutely.”
She smiled, and they kissed. She lingered on his lips, then finally they loosened their grip on each other and she stepped away. She got into the jeep, and the soldiers shut the door. Peter followed to her house, an old Rana temple that had been converted into apartments for her extended family. He could see a silhouette waiting in an upstairs window. They got out of the cars and met by the gate.
“That him?” he asked.
She nodded. “He knows I’ve been old enough to do as I please for a long time,” she said. “But that doesn’t stop him from thinking of me as a little girl. If there were any justice in the world, he would have worked himself into a stroke by now.”
TWENTY-ONE
Peter had been wondering about the changes he’d seen in Devi since her stay among the anis. She still laughed easily and kidded around with Alex, but something was stirring beneath the surface.
Wayne Lee bleated out back. The afternoon light fell through the kitchen windows as Peter chopped vegetables.
“Anything interesting happen at the monastery?” he asked, as neutrally as possible.
“Lama Padma asked me to translate for his California students while I was there,” she said. “Then word got around and more Westerners started showing up. By the end of the week I was sitting up in front with him and translating for, like, twenty people.”
Peter was astonished. “You must be the most modest person on earth,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugged and got up to wash the beans. “It’s not really anything to be proud about,” she said. “It’s actually really nerve-racking. All these people are waiting, so you have to think quickly. There are a lot of specialized terms in Tibetan, and the same thing has different meanings in different contexts. I got stressed trying to keep it all straight.”
“What, for example?”
“Well, Alex told me once that Eskimos have about a hundred different words for snow. But Tibetans have all these words for consciousness, with a lot of subtle variations. Sometimes it’s hard to know which one they mean.”
“You’re happy, though?”
She smiled. “It’s what I like best, I think. Studying dharma, being with the lama. It feels like coming home.”
“If you’ve found your calling at eighteen you’ve got the rest of us beat.”
She fished through the drawer and picked out a knife. “You didn’t decide to be a doctor when you were young?”
“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “I’ve never told Alex about this, though, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.”
“Okay,” she said, a little warily.
“After college I had an old Kawasaki with a cargo box on the back, and I spent a couple of years bombing around California and Oregon, climbing rock. I was lean and callused, and went pretty much unwashed for days at a time, but I don’t ever remember being happier.”
She looked at him. “But you quit? Why?”
He hesitated. “It was just time to,” he said.
He remembered very well why he’d quit, though. He’d been free-climbing a 5.9 pitch at Smith Rock, three hundred feet off the deck, when first one shoe slipped off the rock, and then a hand, and he swung slowly out away from the face like a door opening. He struggled to get a hand or a foot back on the rock, but he couldn’t move without risking his only foothold. He was adhered to the cliff fa
ce largely by force of will, and his leg was starting to shake with the strain.
His climbing partner, Dave, was talking to him in an urgent voice, but Peter couldn’t understand a word. Usually, if you fell while climbing, it was sudden. You either spidered out your rope or, if you were free-climbing, cratered before you knew what hit you. He’d never expected it to be slow like that, to give him time to contemplate what was happening. The last of his strength drained from his arm, and his shoe started slipping, ever so slightly, off the nubbin that held it. He had maybe two or three seconds left and there was no longer anything to lose, so he managed one last effort, a dynamic swing over and a big reach, and somehow found a tiny handhold, just enough for two fingers, and then a foothold, and then he was facing the rock again. He carefully reattached himself and settled for a second, trying to get his breath. Stars twinkled at the corners of his vision, and for a few moments he thought he might pass out. He hung there, panting, for two or three minutes, afraid to move, as Dave talked to him from somewhere over on the right.
Peter looked and saw his friend ensconced in a big, comfortable-looking crack. At first Peter wasn’t willing to give up any of his holds, but he knew that sooner or later he’d have to. After another couple of minutes Dave talked him over, hold by hold, and then Peter got a foot, and then a hand, and then another foot into the crack. He brought in the last hand, astonished at this sudden deliverance.
The rock was warm. There was a breeze, and soon the sweat started to evaporate and cool him down. Dave advanced upward, then Peter moved up a little, too, and found another hold. Dave went ahead, talking to him in what seemed to be the language of birds. After a half hour or so they reached a ledge from which it was possible to traverse off the face and scramble down the back side of the cliff.
This kind of thing happened to all climbers sooner or later. If you were dedicated enough, you shrugged it off and kept going. Peter was not. That afternoon was the first time that he’d really understood, viscerally, that he was mortal, believed it in a way he could not dismiss as something distant and abstract. Once he’d felt the great, dark maw open under him, he lost any interest in tempting it further. He sold his gear rack the next week, but the nightmares he kept for years.
Standing there in the kitchen with Devi, all this came back so vividly that his palms began to sweat. This beautiful young woman was chopping carrots, and he was here, alive.
“So if you just got tired of it, why didn’t you want Alex to know?” she asked.
“You’ve seen her play basketball,” he said quietly. “Climbing wasn’t something I wanted her fanatical about.”
TWENTY-TWO
That first week of April in 2006, when antigovernment riots broke out in Kathmandu, Peter went home and brought Alex and Devi in to the clinic. Mina, Usha, and the clinic’s two other nurses were already there. Anne and David drove the jeep in from Jorpati. By sundown they were swamped with the injured. When the house was full they laid people on mats in the backyard. They stitched lacerations, set bones, tamponaded broken noses, wired jaws. Rubber bullets had broken ribs and shattered facial bones, even blinded a couple of people.
Early in the day, the various opposition groups had joined together and called for a general strike. Tens of thousands of protesters pushed through the city, shutting down everything and eventually converging on the Royal Palace. There had always been an understanding that there would be no physical threat to the palace or the king, so this threw the army into a panic.
Peter and the girls scurried between the litters, doing their best to triage as people cried out and moaned and called for help. Franz shuffled around, checking for broken bones, and Mina moved through the ranks, squatting and talking to people, trying to figure out what had happened to them. They transferred the really serious cases—compound fractures, bullet wounds, internal bleeding, and the like—to hospitals when they could, but one woman had miscarried, hemorrhaging badly, and three others died before any ambulances came. They started transporting people in oxcarts, tempos, and taxis. It was train-wreck military medicine.
They worked straight through the night, stopping in turns for food or coffee. At seven o’clock the next morning, when things finally started to settle down, Franz turned on the news. It was soon clear that the bloodshed had been unnecessary. The day before, the king had heeded his generals’ advice and taken his family to his country estate in the south. He hadn’t even been at the palace.
“Jesus,” said Franz. “All they had to do was tell them.”
The phone rang.
“Leave it,” said Mina. “It won’t be good news.”
Franz picked it up anyway. “Scheisse,” he said. He listened for a few moments, his eyes roving anxiously about the room. “They had to do this today? They couldn’t wait? Right. So where are they?”
He reached for a pad and jotted down a few notes, then hung up and turned to them. The call was a radio relay from the north. Two climbers had fallen on Annapurna and had been badly injured. They’d been moved down to a village a few miles from base camp, but they would have to be evacuated.
Peter was so exhausted his hands were shaking. “This should be the RNA’s job, or at least CIWEC’s,” he said.
“The CIWEC staff will be as done in as we are after last night,” Franz said. “Anyway, they can’t get a chopper.”
“How are we supposed to get one if they can’t?”
Franz looked at Mina.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m barely speaking to the old fascist as it is. Every time he hears rifle fire he does a little jig. I’m not asking him for any favors.”
The room fell silent. “All right, then,” said Franz. “I’ll tell them we can’t go.” He reached for the phone.
“Wait,” said Mina. “Just wait a minute.”
| | |
The colonel’s one condition was that his daughter not take the trip herself. Franz needed her, anyway, so Peter conscripted Alex as well as Devi, who had grown up near there and knew the dialect. Usha would stay with Mina while they were away.
Mina drove them to the airport. “You’ve got all your gear together?” she asked, sounding nervous.
“Sure,” he said. “Why?”
“Because time travel is real around here,” she said. “When you get out of the Kathmandu Valley you’re going to find yourself in the Middle Ages.”
At the drop-off, Alex and Devi got out and pulled their knapsacks from the trunk. Peter leaned over, and he and Mina kissed. The girls grinned at him when he got out of the car.
“You’re living in a glass house,” he said. “Not a word.”
They crowded into the chopper and put on headphones, which allowed conversation at a level slightly below the primal scream. The young pilot, Krishna, had trained in Germany, where the RNA sent most of its fliers. He fired up the engine, lifted off, and turned north.
As the morning warmed, strong updrafts started to knock the chopper around. Peter alternated between being flattened into his seat and feeling like he’d just been pushed out of a tenth-story window. Even Devi was a little green.
They followed valleys whenever they could, but occasionally they had to go up over ridges—high, serrated knife edges from which snowmelt fell in rainbowed plumes down to lush terraced fields. At the valley bottoms, rivers glinted, reflecting the sky. Alex, of course, hated to fly, and this was much worse than a 747.
The Himalayas looked like gigantic frozen tsunamis, white-capped wave sets that receded into the distance under a luminous vault of blue. In geologic time they were tsunamis, shoved up by tectonic forces that rippled granite instead of water. If such mountains had a message, Peter reflected, it was simply that they would outlast all humans and anything they built, for the waves were still growing in size.
The chopper’s engine clattered and roared, sounding unreliable, as if important parts might be working themselves loose. After about a half hour they crossed a particularly jagged ridge, then banked sharply to the left. The
helicopter leaned forward with a whine and began to fall. Alex grabbed Peter’s hand, and he put an arm around her, as if that would protect her when they hit the ground and were atomized.
Their descent slowed as they neared the earth, though, and the g-forces pressed them into their seats as they came in over a field where there was a metal hangar of some kind. Krishna swooped in, hovered, and set the chopper down. He cut the engine and opened his door.
“Sorry so steep,” he said, over his shoulder, when the rotors had slowed. “Important not to run out of fuel! Walk around while we gas up, if you like.” He lit a cigarette and stepped out onto the concrete pad. According to a hand-painted sign on a corrugated tin building nearby, they were in Pokhara.
Alex unbuckled herself, opened her door, then stumbled out and vomited. Peter squatted beside her and patted her back.
“You okay?”
“Not really, no,” she said, and threw up again. Peter got her a water bottle, then looked into the cockpit and went over to Krishna.
“The gauge reads a quarter of a tank,” he said angrily. “You think you could take it a little easier?”
Krishna pulled his cigarette from his mouth and exhaled, blowing smoke all around them in the mountain breeze. “Believe me,” he said, “it is necessary to fly this way.”
“Why?”
“Let us hope you do not have to find out, sir.”
| | |
Krishna lifted up just enough to clear the fueling shed, then made a long, low run over the valley at treetop height. When they’d cleared the town and were approaching the foothills, he yanked back on the stick, and the chopper climbed fast. Alex swallowed and closed her eyes, and Peter’s gut was churning. They cleared the first ridge and continued northwest through a series of valleys toward Annapurna. All around them, the mountains spewed great plumes of snow into the jet stream.
A half hour later, with the great mountain looming before them, they dove again, down into valleys. After a few minutes there was smoke and a little village below, and Krishna leveled off just over the ground and set down in a dry rice paddy. The villagers came running as soon as the prop wash died down, then led Peter and the girls to a small house where the sherpas had carried the climbers.