Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  Fruit, the idea of food, should make Sophie’s mouth water, but in this growing warmth all she can think of is sleep.

  A patch of stunted poplars grows between her trail and the wall of the valley, and here the wall is not so steep, so that sunlight is pushing toward her across the river and will soon light up her path. Sunrise near noon. She enters the tiny forest. The trees are maybe twice her height, little more. Rippling leaves of bright yellow, the rusty dead ones at her toes rustling in their layers. November smells, as if she’s back home with Scott, searching the woods for a good place—a kiss, a feel, is sweetly scorching in the cold—hearing the busy viaduct and the parkway, those soothing urban rivers.

  At the back of the wood she finds a spot, dead leaves over white pepper sand, and pulls on her father’s sweater and lies down. A shuddering wrings her to her core and when it dies out she begins to sob. She pulls the parka over her body. As she closes her eyes, that Halloween parade of faces appears again, along with a dimmer face, turned away as if in shyness or mourning. Her eyes spring open. The dead guard. She is hiding in a clump of trees by a glacial river in Tibet and she has no map or food and she is being hunted, maybe, by vengeful twenty-year-olds with submachineguns—not the metro police. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, love, but I’m here now. Her father, six weeks back. Her father telling her again that he wanted to get her out of here, meaning North America. For years I’ve wanted to. Before her parents had split up, he’d wanted them all to live in Central America, or India, or Peru, or move with him among his safer postings, get a true education, he said. But Sophie had her school, her friends and guitar and blog and cartoon, Pavlos had his team sports and sullen rages, Yiayia would rather live with them than with her son in Sherbrooke, and Sophie’s mother had a research position, her colleagues, her home. Her husband had apparently lost his mind, she said. Even Sophie, who adored him, could see that he’d grown impractical. Sixteen months ago her parents had separated—which simply meant that when her father returned, ill and skinny, from Sumatra after the tsunami, he’d checked into the Lakeshore Motel and come to “visit” the next day. She guessed he was to blame, after all. That’s what he said himself. So each departure since then made her blame him all over again, yet his returns made her forgive, so that her mother, lacking the benefit of this dramatic pattern—departure, absence, return—bore the eventual brunt of Sophie’s deeper blame, and ensuing actions. Her dad rehydrating infants in Darjeeling while the cops rapped unsoftly at the door and asked for Sophana Book. Scott’s parents calling in a fury. They believed Sophie had led their son astray and it turned out that Scott had urged them, along with the cops, to think so.

  “Your papa should be back in town any minute,” her mother had said, wryly, no sign of grievance, as Sophie noted with some hope. (Her mother’s accent thickened whenever she spoke of family, as opposed to professional matters, when it all but vanished.) “Whenever someone is in trouble on the other side of the world, he hops onto a plane.”

  And he did.

  As she lies in the plum-yellow shadows a sentence unrolls in her mind: In my youth he sheltered me, and I’ll protect him now. Something memorized in grade school, the other side of the world. The rest seems gone. The other side of the river. Her heart is slowing down at last, it hardly seems to beat. Sloping sunlight, the day’s first hit on this shore, filters down through the candling leaves to warm her eyelids.

  Take Me from the Wilderness

  In the spring of 1898, the Canadian doctor Susie Rijnhart, née Carson, and her husband, Petrus, a Dutch missionary, embarked on a journey across the Tibetan plateau toward the forbidden city of Lhasa, where they hoped to establish a Christian mission and medical post. They brought with them their eleven-month-old son Charlie, three native porters, a number of ponies for riding and for carrying supplies, and their dog. The young couple had already carried out several years of medical and missionary work on the Tibetan-Chinese frontier, so they had the advantage of speaking the language and understanding the customs of the country. They even dressed Tibetan-style for their journey. Still, in setting out to reach Lhasa, they were trying to accomplish what no other Westerners had ever done.

  Over the course of the summer they managed to cover a thousand kilometres across desert and through marshes and over passes where at times the trail was forlornly defined by the bones, recent or ancient, of travellers and their animals. They crossed into a lawless province and before long the bandits then common in the region stole some of their ponies. Two of their porters deserted them. Then, in August, their son, seemingly healthy as he rode in his father’s arms, fell into a sleep from which his mother could not revive him. He lay pale and still. In her own words, she “loosened baby’s garments, chafed his wrists, performed artificial respiration, though feeling almost certain that nothing would avail.” Possibly Charlie died of some kind of altitude sickness. She and her husband, trying and failing to get through the hymn “Take Me from the Wilderness,” wept, along with their porter Rahim, over the body of this child that Dr. Rijnhart had called “[our] little flower blooming on the bleak and barren Dang La.”

  They pushed on toward Lhasa, broken-hearted but still set on their missionary intervention, continuing to dispense evangelical tracts written in Tibetan but now meeting stronger opposition—sometimes the official opposition of regional governors and their troops, sometimes the random harassment of outlaws. In early autumn, having sent Rahim home on one of the ponies, they were attacked by a band of these men and lost their dog and all but one of their remaining ponies. They fled and camped in a snowstorm on the banks of the Tsa Chu—the sourcewaters of the Mekong River—hoping to cross the next day and reach an encampment they could see in the distance so as to buy more ponies and supplies. The next morning Petrus Rijnhart waded into the river. When he was halfway out, at the edge of the deep channel where he would have to swim, his wife saw him glance upstream—her own view in that direction was blocked by rocky outcrops—and then stop and slog back toward her. When he reached the shore, he yelled something that she did not hear and then started walking upstream, vanishing beyond the outcrops. It was the last she ever saw of him.

  Dr. Rijnhart walked down to the shore and looked upstream and saw another encampment not far off on her own side of the river. No sign of her husband, who she assumed must already be inside one of the tents, negotiating. However, when he failed to return by the next morning she realized the truth: he must have walked straight into an encampment of outlaws—perhaps the same ones who’d attacked them a few days earlier—and was now surely dead. The doctor could only flee eastward, two months later reaching a mission post in the same Tibetan frontier region from which she and her lost family had set out some six months before.

  In 1901 the doctor published a book about her experiences in Tibet. A few years later, in China, she married another missionary, and in 1907, pregnant and ill, she returned to Canada, where she died eight weeks after giving birth to another son.

  “HERE IS YOUR NICE CLEAN single cell, doctor.”

  Palden Jangbu holds Book’s bicep gently and, with the other hand, sweepingly indicates the tiny cell, like a concierge showing off a VIP suite. His assault rifle is over his shoulder, a cigarette drooping from his mouth. It seems to have gone out.

  “Thanks,” Book says, “but I have to be in the end cell. With your compatriots.”

  “But Lewis, they are not patriots, they are Splittists!” He speaks sincerely, patiently. “They wish to bring Tibet back into the, the primitive age—before the liberation.”

  “I need to be with the wounded man and the nun.”

  “We can take you there whenever there is a need! It is very full up.”

  “They need me now.”

  “You are not used to it, I am thinking.”

  “Palden—”

  “And this cell is so nice.”

  He sounds hurt on the cell’s behalf. Book exhales and glances past him. A few dim, bare light bulbs hang by their wires from the
hallway ceiling, showing the concrete floors and walls and ceilings and the bars of the cells and the steel door at the head of the hallway, all painted a bilious green. Book’s boots, with bloodied socks scrunched up inside them, hang by their laces over his shoulders.

  “Please,” he says, the word a rumble low in his throat.

  Palden sags his head, brings out his lighter, cups his hands over his mouth and rasps, “Okay, Lewis,” in a cloud of smoke. He takes Book’s arm and draws him toward the last of the five cells that line one side of the hallway. Each cell has a back wall, side walls and, facing onto the hallway, a row of floor-to-ceiling stanchions with a barred door set into it, like a jail cell in a western.

  “Lew…?” Book glances back. All he can see of Amaris is her small, tanned fists gripping the bars of her cell—the first of the five—near the head of the hallway and the side passage leading out to the yard through which they were just herded in. “I can join you in that cell too,” she calls thinly. “If you need the help.”

  She might be lonely—or is she just offering out of a sense that she should? She doesn’t strike him as the lonely type, or the type for oughts and shoulds. But who can say. She’s frank with her opinions, her feelings show graphically on her face, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of other things she walls up inside. He calls back, “I think two of us would overcrowd them. Stay put, get some rest while you can.”

  Ahead, the giant soldier stands in front of the last cell with a medieval-looking ring of keys, gently rattling the door to check that it’s locked. Behind him the soldier with the hard, muscled face holds his rifle poised. An odd ruckus resounds from the cell. At Palden’s nod, the giant inserts a key and swings open the barred door to let Book go in.

  This cell is a bit wider than the first four, though still far too small for its occupants. Yet it’s a scene of celebration, as if Book has stumbled on a wedding in the corridors of a death camp. In fact it’s a reunion: the father, his daughter and a very pregnant woman, whom Book hasn’t seen before, cling together. The little girl, held high between them, hinges them with her arms in a swaying, shuddering family hug. Beside them, the old nun and the wounded one press their brows to the brow of a plump, rosy young nun—a little Buddha in maroon and saffron robes with a chunky necklace, shaved head and milk-bottle glasses held on with a strap. Despite the chill, her right shoulder is bare in the traditional way.

  The nuns and young monks have already moved to opposite sides of the cell. Three of the monks sit in a row on one of the fold-down cots, while the family and the other refugees occupy the cell’s cramped floor. Norbu and his friend in the toque seem to eye the row of monks as if staring down a rival gang. The old widow with the skein of grey braids, her face wrinkled and dark as a Navaho elder’s, sits on a blanket with a smokeless pipe chomped in her gums. At the back, Lhundup Boshay lies on a second cot. One of the monks kneels beside him. In the cell’s corner, a reeking, rim-spattered hole in the floor.

  Palden Jangbu steps into the cell after Book and announces something in loud Tibetan, his tone businesslike and brusque. Faces swing toward that voice. Book wonders now if Palden could be a bit slow. The lighting is poor, but how can he be unaware of the hatred seething around him? The widow’s grief seems hardened to rage. The monks and the two youths now seem allied in their animosity, like rival gangs turning on a lone cop.

  Palden shifts blithely to English: “Oh, Lewis! I just informed the Splittists that you will be staying here in the cell also. Also I said that we will give you all tea and a nice snack, by and by, before so long.”

  “Palden, I told you—we need water, now! And I need to see the lieutenant.”

  “Of course, Lewis. Thank you!” He pivots crisply and strides out amid further murmuring. The giant soldier relocks the door and shambles away.

  Book nods to the pregnant woman—beautiful wide-set eyes, a space between her front teeth, scores of long braids draping over a mauve cardigan—and then to the plump young nun in her thick glasses.

  “Welcome!” she tells him with vigour.

  “Tashi delek,” he says, going to the wounded man’s side.

  “My name is Choden—Choden Lhamu.”

  “Lewis Book.”

  “Do you speak our language, then?” she asks, with an odd, melodious lilt he tries to place. Though the magnifying lenses blur her eyes, their warmth and focus is such that they give an impression of limpid clarity. She looks unnaturally well for someone who has been jailed, he guesses, for several days.

  “Just a few words, I’m afraid.”

  “I can speak some English,” she says. “I studied back in Lhasa, with an engineer?”

  That accent. He feels his cracked lips stretching into a smile.

  “We had to keep the tutorials on the sly. He was a fellow from Waterford? Please see to your patient and we’ll chat when the tea comes.”

  “Patients, actually.”

  “Of course—her name is Pema Dolkar.” Choden nods toward the wounded nun. “The elder one we call Ani Dolma.”

  “Thanks,” he says. “And that would be the Irish Waterford?”

  “It would.”

  He examines the dressing over Lhundup’s wound. From among her mother’s skirts, the child watches Book work, while her father speaks, gesturing emphatically, apparently telling his wife and Choden Lhamu their story. The joyous tone of just minutes ago has vanished. The wedding has become a wake. The capture, the dumping of the bodies in the crevasse—Book can almost follow the narrative via the lifts and falls and stresses of the man’s quavery tenor. Now even Choden looks troubled. Norbu supplies an incensed outburst and one of the monks seems to counter it, softly, as if trying to calm him down.

  Book finds his stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. He sees that there’s a blanket under Lhundup’s back; somebody, maybe the pregnant woman, has given up her cot.

  Somehow the man’s blood pressure is holding.

  “Choden…how long have you been here?”

  “About two days.” Her brogue is thicker on some words, while on others she sounds more like Palden. Calmly, as if recounting a distant event, she says, “We were all trekking up the valley toward the ice, with the soldiers coming, when Lasya began having her pains. She seemed sure to be having an early birth. It was getting higher and colder, and we were after dropping most of our bags and packs, so we might trek faster. She decided that she must walk down and surrender to the guards, and I returned with her, to help her. She wanted Sonam—this is her husband, Sonam Goba?—to go on, to be sure of getting their daughter to the frontier, and perhaps Lasya would be able to join them soon, in the future. We did hope that our surrender would slow the pursuit. So down we go and surrender and a pleasant guard brings us down to the guard post and two soldiers come for us in a truck and drive us here.”

  “Not to the hospital?”

  “Luckily the pains did stop.”

  “Her water didn’t break, then.”

  Choden’s enlarged eyes go blank, but then she nods. “No—her water didn’t break then.”

  “And there’s been no, uh, no cramping since?”

  “There hasn’t.”

  Book nods toward the seated monks. “Shouldn’t she have the cot there? The bed?”

  “I agree with you, and the monks would too, I think, but Lasya is from a small town, very traditional. Oh, and the beds are too narrow for her now, she complains.”

  Lasya and her family are watching. Choden nods—bows, really—toward the old widow with the pipe. “She, Dechen Nima, feels likewise.”

  Book bows his head to the widow, trying to convey his sympathies.

  “By the way,” Choden says solemnly, “may I offer you some socks, Lewis?”

  Faces turn toward the door: the parade-square tromp of Palden’s boots returning. He appears through the bars, jingling the ring of keys, singing the pulsing refrain of “Psycho Killer” under his breath: fa fa fa faaaaa fa. The hunched giant follows, bearing a tray with two large
tin pots, stacks of nesting cups and a heap of grey, brick-like things.

  “Water and oolong tea,” Palden calls out as the heavy door grates open, “and the PLA ration bars. Very good!”

  “They really are quite tasty,” Choden says. “Really sweet.”

  Norbu’s lips are spliced tight and his acne is livid; he’s scowling at Choden as if she is some kind of collaborator. Book hears a faint grunt and turns to Lhundup, whose narrow eyes have opened to stare fixedly at Palden. The sclera is not bloodshot but clear as the white of a poached egg. Lhundup whispers something and Norbu looks over and nods fiercely. Besides that, there’s a silence more ominous than the muttering before.

  “We still need a hospital, Palden. Are we—”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Zhao says he will speak to you shortly.” Palden won’t quite meet Book’s eyes. “Just please you rest for the moment.”

  The clang of the door closing and locking, and he’s gone.

  “The others don’t care for him,” Choden says with no sign of personal grievance. “He’s Tibetan, you know.”

  Book nods, his mouth watering.

  “I don’t know why he would join against his people,” she says. “Even if he felt the old Tibet wasn’t perfectly fair, the present Dalai Lama is so modern. Alas, Palden isn’t the only one. Please, you’ll have my tea. I’ve had several cups during my stay.”

  “I’ll save it for him, thanks.”

  The family, the old widow, Norbu and his friend are all cross-legged on the floor as if in a nomad’s yurt, the women filling the mugs, the child passing them around. Book gets Choden to brace Lhundup’s balding head as Book holds a mug so the man can sip tea and swallow antibiotics and codeine. He brings more Clindamycin and codeine to Pema Dolkar, who nods thanks, smiles weakly and swallows the four pills at once, as if she takes pills every day. Through Choden he asks Pema to lie on the cot and rest; later he will check the splint and change the dressing. He returns to Lhundup. He takes his own mug and guzzles the tepid, wonderful tea, wishing only that it were spiked with a finger of Mingma’s drastic Nepali gin. He gnaws at something resembling a slab of dirty rock salt. A taste of peanuts and sickly sweet condensed milk. The texture of sandstone. Marvellous.