Exiles

by Cary Groner

  Adhiraj got up and walked to the window, then gestured for Peter to join him. The lights of his village spread out below like a little fiefdom. There were a couple of bonfires in the streets, with dark figures moving around them. Across the valley, the snowcapped peaks were losing the last of their alpenglow.

  “It’s beautiful here, is it not?” said Adhiraj.

  Peter looked at him, startled. “You speak English?”

  “Sometimes it is useful to maintain a pretense,” he said. “But it appears you are who you say you are, so I doubt I will gain significant intelligence from you.” Adhiraj called the guard in and told him to take Devi away. “Your daughter may remain here,” he said. “But I wish to speak with you about something more important than this diabetes.”

  The guard took Devi out. Adhiraj and Peter went back to the table while Alex continued reading in the corner, careful to keep her eyes on the page. Adhiraj poured wine for both of them and sat down. Peter, still standing, took a sip; it was, surprisingly, a reasonably good merlot. Adhiraj seemed more relaxed now that his day’s work was over, and he leaned back in his seat. He gestured at the other chair. Peter sat.

  “I would like to know how the Americans see our movement,” he said.

  Peter wasn’t sure how frank he could afford to be. “I don’t mean to offend you,” he said, “but these days people are a lot more concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  Adhiraj sighed. “I had thought perhaps this was true.”

  “It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Peter said. “If there was oil here and the CIA considered you a threat, this village would be a crater by now.”

  Adhiraj smiled. “You must be considered very left-wing in your country, Doctor.”

  “I think I’m pretty much in the middle of the road where the rest of the world is concerned.”

  Adhiraj pressed his index finger to the table and rotated it back and forth, idly, as if crushing a bug. “Here we say that those in the middle of the road get hit from both directions.”

  Peter had another drink of wine to steady his nerves. It was a little like a job interview, he realized—a casual pretense obscuring how much was at stake.

  “My followers are, for the most part, about the age of your daughter,” Adhiraj continued. “They have enthusiasm, but they are not particularly knowledgeable.”

  “You could change that without a lot of trouble.”

  Adhiraj smiled. “The ignorance or the enthusiasm?”

  “The ignorance.”

  “Too much thinking makes indecision,” he said. “We cannot afford it. Did you know that the annual per capita income in this country is less than three hundred dollars?”

  “I did know, in fact.”

  “And yet everyone in the royal family is able to afford a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley. I would think such a thing would offend the American sensibility.”

  Adhiraj was expressing opinions pretty similar to Peter’s own, and Peter hoped he could steer things into sympathetic terrain. “It would have, until about the end of World War Two,” Peter said. “Since then, we’ve had royalty too. They’re largely above the law, they run things how it pleases them, and most of them don’t pay taxes.”

  Adhiraj appeared surprised. “What sort of royalty is this?”

  “Corporations,” Peter said, “and they’re worse than King George ever was. If a war is good for business, we have a war. If single-payer healthcare is bad for profits, we don’t have it. They control the debate and the airwaves, and it turns out to be surprisingly easy to scare people into going along.”

  Adhiraj smiled thinly. “Perhaps we have some common ground, after all,” he said.

  Peter was relieved to hear it. He was enjoying the wine and the chance to talk. He was also glad that Adhiraj seemed open to frankness.

  “It’s not like I’m in your camp either,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs. “Communism is how all our tribal ancestors lived for thousands of years, and it’s a beautiful idea. But it ought to be obvious that when the population grows beyond a certain point, it doesn’t work anymore.”

  Adhiraj raised his eyebrows. “Why do you say this?”

  “It’s human nature. When you live in a small group, it pays to act for the good of everyone because you get personal benefits from it.”

  “Of course.”

  “But when you no longer know those people, it makes more sense to look after your own self-interest, within reason. So then someone has to force people to participate in this fake bureaucratic altruism, and you end up with Stalin and Mao and Kim Jong-il.”

  “So a society is either tribal or capitalist?” Adhiraj asked. “You consider those the only two options?”

  “There’s capitalism and there’s capitalism,” Peter said. “It doesn’t have to be a shark tank, like the U.S. You can provide medical care, tax the rich, and get the money out of elections so the politicians do their jobs instead of whoring themselves to the highest bidder.”

  Adhiraj emptied his wineglass and set it down. “And this would be your advice to me, should we succeed?”

  Alex, over in the corner, cleared her throat ever so quietly. Peter knew it was directed at him, but he didn’t know why. He stopped to consider where this was going. He felt a little light-headed, admittedly, after the long day and the wine, but Adhiraj seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say, and he doubted any harm would come of being honest.

  “My first advice, I suppose, would be to stop pillaging and killing people,” he said. “Folks out there aren’t real happy with you, as I’m sure you know.”

  Adhiraj stared. “And yet my recruits grow by twenty or thirty every month,” he said, his voice even. “We are in a position to win the war before summer’s end.”

  “Of course,” said Peter. “Your recruits seem loyal to you now.”

  “Seem loyal?”

  “Look, you take poor kids with no chances and you promise them food and shelter. That kind of obedience you can get from a dog. But if you kick out the king you’re going to have to govern this place, and it would be good if people were on your side out of choice rather than necessity.”

  Adhiraj poured the last of the wine into his glass. “An interesting perspective, Doctor,” he said. He abruptly stood, walked to the door, and called his guard. He spoke to the guard briefly in Nepali.

  “Please follow this man,” Adhiraj said to Peter and Alex. He turned and walked back to the table.

  Peter, perplexed, looked at his daughter. She had turned pale. The guard led them down the hill to a small one-room house in the village. What had gone wrong? Was Adhiraj so thin-skinned?

  There were nine or ten other people in the room, sitting against the walls or lying down. As soon as they were inside, Alex found Devi and put her arms around her.

  “What happened?” Peter asked. “What did he say to the guard?”

  Alex looked at him, her eyes frightened. “He said you were the most dangerous kind of bourgeois intellectual,” she said. “Why did you have to keep talking like that?”

  Peter was floored. “I was trying to establish some common ground with the guy,” he said. “I figured it would help us get out of here.”

  “You had too much wine, and you were lecturing him.”

  “I had half a glass!”

  “We’ve barely eaten, and we’re at twelve thousand feet, Dad!”

  He realized that he was drunk, if only a little. “Well, what are they going to do?” he asked.

  Alex was crying and shaking now. “He told them to take us across the river and shoot us in the morning, so no one learns where this place is.”

  | | |

  Alex lay in Devi’s lap. Her diarrhea had started a few hours before. Peter figured she’d picked something up from the stream, or that her fear had sent her gut into spasm, or both. Off in the distance someone rang a bell, and from all around the village, dogs began to howl.

  Peter sat against the wall, arms crossed on his raised knees,
his head dropped forward onto his forearms. He had failed again—again!—and he was astonished at his own stupidity. He hadn’t said anything to Adhiraj he didn’t believe, but that wasn’t the question; the question was judgment. If he hadn’t been loosened up with wine he would have had the sense to keep his mouth shut. Of course, this was what Adhiraj had in mind; he’d outflanked him, deftly and easily, learned whether he would be useful or not with fifty cents’ worth of alcohol. While Peter was feeling so shrewd for having Alex eavesdrop on the conversation, the commandant had pulled the oldest and simplest of maneuvers, and Peter had been gullible enough to fall for it. He had just vowed to be more careful and less trusting, and then he’d let his guard down yet again, out of stupid ego, out of infatuation with the cleverness of his own ideas. He wanted to shoot himself—he was so furious that if he could have gotten ahold of one of the rifles he thought he might really do it—but in any case he didn’t have to worry because now the job would be done for him.

  He couldn’t face Alex and Devi, and not surprisingly, they didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with him. Devi had forgiven him in a way, referring simply to his miscalculation, but her grudging tone made it even harder to absolve himself.

  After Devi dozed off around midnight, Alex came over and sat beside him to share what warmth they could.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “It was beyond stupid, what I did. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but if I can ever make it up to you, I will.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to have a chance, Dad,” she said quietly.

  They sat in silence for a while, listening to the rustling and coughing in the room, the sounds of the night from outside.

  “I want you to tell me something,” Alex said. “What?”

  “Whenever I’ve asked you how you and Mom got together, you’ve always evaded the subject. I want to know the story.”

  “You may not like it,” he said.

  “What difference does it make?” she asked, her anger flaring.

  He took a breath. “Your mother and I hooked up at a bar when I was in my residency at UCLA,” he said. “I was exhausted all the time, and lonely, because I was too busy to have any kind of a social life. In those days, when she was young, Cheryl was actually pretty fun. We spent the night together and went out a few more times, but I had to study constantly between thirty-six-hour shifts at the hospital, and your mom was a party girl who went bar-hopping four or five nights a week.”

  Alex sighed. “You guys just hooked up? It was a lust thing?”

  “Not just that,” he said carefully. “We got along okay. But we had really different lives, and it didn’t take long to figure out we weren’t a great match.”

  “How long were you together?” she asked, as if she already knew the answer. This was going about as badly as he’d feared.

  “A couple of weeks, really, was all. A month or so later I got the phone call.”

  “About me, you mean.”

  “I had it checked out, of course, given how she lived. But I was definitely your dad.”

  She sat up, wobbly as she was, and moved just slightly away, so that their bodies no longer touched. “So you didn’t exactly want me. I wasn’t like some great plan you’d made.”

  “You asked for the truth.”

  “Jesus. I see why you didn’t want to tell me.”

  “I didn’t want you until I met you, Alex. I saw you when you were about three hours old, and that was it.”

  “That was what?”

  “You think I’ve stuck around all this time out of some sense of duty?”

  “It sure looks that way.”

  “I never wanted you to know the whole preamble, because it didn’t matter at that point in my life. I didn’t even know what love was. Then I saw you, and I did.”

  She shifted. “And what about Mom?” she said, her voice a little softer. “The truth.”

  He thought about how to put it. “Cheryl needed a certain amount of convincing,” he said. “She wasn’t sure she was up for it.”

  “That doesn’t exactly come as news,” she said. “But why did you stay together so long? You thought that unlike half the kids in the country, I was such a little wuss I couldn’t stand a divorce?”

  “You’re not a wuss. But if I’d divorced her it would have meant shared custody. You’d have been spending time alone with her and her friends.”

  “Did she even want me? I’d have thought she’d be happy to dump me on you.”

  “She loved you, Alex, but love isn’t always enough. I could tell it wasn’t going to stop her from screwing you up royally if I wasn’t around to intercede.”

  She wiped at her eyes. “You stayed miserable all these years to protect me?”

  “I could take it. I just wasn’t sure you could.”

  “Well, what was different this time?”

  “After Wayne Lee came back, I knew I could finally get you away from her. That’s all.”

  She coughed, weakly, a few times. “Well, thanks for telling me, I guess,” she said, sounding exhausted and bereft.

  Devi stirred. Alex put her hand on Peter’s, just briefly, then crawled back over to lie down with her. Peter could tell from her breathing that she was soon asleep again. When she was, and he was squatting there in the cold, alone, without her to hear him, his throat tightened and his face grew hot, and he began to weep. He tried to stop it but he couldn’t. It felt as though it would empty him. He sobbed as quietly as he could, for fear of waking her again, as in darkness the tears fell from his blind eyes into dust.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  At dawn, Peter heard angry voices. He had dozed off, and he awoke feeling as if his bones were made of glass. He crawled to the doorway and peered outside. Three of the guerrillas were arguing with Ramesh, the boy who’d led them up the valley. Alex awakened groggily and moved over to the wall. Peter crawled back to her.

  “What are they saying?” he asked.

  “Ramesh wants the job,” she said wearily. “He says he’s older, so the least they can do is let him have the honors.”

  Peter turned to Devi. “They’d probably let you join up, if you asked,” he said. “You could save yourself, buy some time.”

  She looked at him as if he were a fool. “You want me to join the people who are going to kill the two of you?”

  “You don’t have to be sincere,” Peter said. “You just have to live.”

  “Peter,” she said, her voice dropping, “there’s something happening here that you don’t know about.”

  But then Ramesh was at the door, grim-faced, apparently having prevailed. The compromise was that one of the guards would accompany him—the one who’d been his rival the day before at the river. He was a real Gurkha warrior, six feet tall and all muscle, the biggest Nepali Peter had ever seen.

  Alex opened her arms up to her father, as she had when she was a child. He held her. He was terrified, his heart beating wildly, but she was so exhausted that she seemed calm. Peter looked over at Devi, but there was no chance now to find out what she’d meant.

  “Now time,” said Ramesh. He clapped his hands together, then unslung his rifle from behind his back.

  He and the other guard led them out. Adhiraj stood outside, in the dawn chill, sipping from a mug of tea. Peter briefly calculated the distance between them, wondered if there was any way he could get to Adhiraj and pull his pistol from his belt before being shot. But there were half a dozen AKs pointed right at him; he’d be dead before he took two steps.

  “I have decided that your daughter is to remain here,” said Adhiraj. Peter stared at him, dumbstruck.

  “Stay here for what?” Devi asked.

  “I have my reasons,” said Adhiraj.

  “If you lay a finger on her—” Peter said.

  “Relax, Doctor, I have much better uses for her than that.”

  Devi snorted. “What he’s saying is that with an American girl here, the RNA won’t dare bomb them.”

  “
You would prefer she died with you?” said Adhiraj.

  “She’ll stay,” said Peter. “Of course she’ll stay. Let her live.”

  Devi stepped forward. “She is a clever girl,” she said to Adhiraj. “She will betray you and escape. You should kill her while you have the chance.”

  “Devi!” cried Alex, her eyes big and wounded.

  But Devi ignored her and continued. “I’ll join your band, and to prove myself, after we cross the river I’ll shoot them myself.”

  Peter slapped her hard across the mouth. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

  The blow sent her reeling, but Ramesh caught her. She wiped at her bleeding lip dismissively with the back of her hand.

  “You do not understand the situation,” she hissed at Peter. “Once again, you have misjudged.”

  Peter looked at her, stunned, but he still had no idea what she was talking about.

  “You really expect me to put a rifle in your hands?” Adhiraj asked.

  Devi indicated Ramesh. “He can stand behind me and shoot me if anything goes wrong.”

  Adhiraj scrutinized her with narrowed eyes. “All right,” he said at last. “You’re the kind of girl we can use. But you’ll only have to shoot the doctor. Your American friend stays here.”

  “I’m telling you, you can’t trust her!” said Devi.

  “That I will judge,” he said. He made a motion with his hand and spoke to the guards in Nepali. Two of them led Alex away. She turned and glanced back at Peter, tears running down her cheeks. Ramesh and the big guard, Bidur, leveled their rifles at Peter. Ramesh barked something at Devi, and they headed out of camp.

  After about twenty minutes they came to the river. Peter was panting in the cold morning air. Ramesh and Bidur started arguing again. Peter and Devi stood a little off to the side as he bent over and tried to get his breath. Little sparks filled the edges of his vision, and he was angry.

  “I don’t understand how you could do this,” he said.

  “I’ve tried to tell you that things are not as they seem.”