Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “I’m sorry.” He looked at the floor.

  There was a long pause. Then she said softly, “I am too.”

  At length she asked, “What would you do in my place?”

  He thought of Davey. “I’d be there with bells on, love, if it made a difference. But that’s a bloody big if.”

  5

  That same night Tot learned of a caravan destined for Kashgar with a cargo of Indian hemp and jute. The leader had already taken on a Muslim merchant and his wife returning with their newborn daughter from a two-year pilgrimage to Mecca. Why not a band of foreigners?

  When they all met the next day Joanna thought the caravan leader bore an unnerving resemblance to Rasputin, and she worried that the size of his load would make them impossibly slow, but Tot said they were ready to start in the morning, and any forward movement was better than none. She agreed with Lawrence to meet the headman’s demand of one hundred Nationalist yuan.

  The sky as they set off was cobalt blue, the sunshine so crisp and sheer it seemed to vibrate in the high mountain air. Behind them the pallid sprawl of Leh stepped down to the newly sprung green of the Indus Valley, and beyond that, layer upon white and blue layer of Himalayas licked the far horizon. Even the ragtag team of caravan men, with their unwashed beards and burning eyes, seemed touched by a degree of splendor. But while the Muslim merchant took his place up front with the headman, his anonymous begum lurched behind them sidesaddle, her child hidden in the folds of her voluminous black burqa. If she took any pleasure in this day, none of them would know, for her face and even her eyes were hidden behind the cloak’s net window.

  Lawrence and Tot chose to walk the first stretch, leading the children’s ponies, but Simon and Kamla soon proved adept at handling their own mounts and could be allowed to move ahead. Simon raised his arm like Roy Rogers spinning a lariat, while beside him Kamla smiled good-naturedly, her face shining in the clear thin light. Joanna knew what they were feeling, this strange, almost addictive blend of freedom and anticipation. The risks of this expedition were countless, yet if she were missing, she told herself, Aidan wouldn’t think twice about going after her. Like Lawrence, in fact, he’d keep copious notes in hopes of getting a book out of it.

  Lawrence used cheap Indian copybooks for his journals. He liked to make lists. Yesterday he’d asked the children to help him name all the foods that were different in Ladakh from Kashmir and in Kashmir from Delhi. Said he found a certain poetry in lists. The beauty as well as the challenge was in the arrangement, he said.

  Aidan, too, once organized his notes with meticulous care. Then the FBI’s first “blind memorandum” hit home. She remembered the bonfire they’d made of his journals in the fireplace back in Maryland. Twelve years’ worth of interviews and observations that spanned the war and the globe. “They can find incriminating evidence in the Lord’s Prayer if they want to,” Aidan said as the flames died down, “but they’re not going to stop me.” He tapped his forehead. “From now on, the notebook’s in here.”

  She shook out her hands and quickened her step. Lawrence dropped back beside her as they passed a crumbling stone and mortar structure, which Tot identified as the Temple of Guardian Deities. The vibration of the air seemed to repeat in the low cyclical chants of the lamas inside. Like the prayer wheels the lamas spun as they sang, the chants marked the constant revolution of life and death and life. “What must it be to believe like that,” Joanna wondered aloud. “To immerse yourself in perpetual devotion.”

  Lawrence answered by turning to Tot. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the idea to escape what it is they’re singing about?”

  The Sherpa trudged in time to the lingering rhythm. He replied, “The object is to achieve release from the worldly cycle of rebirth. To achieve nirvana.”

  “Precisely,” said Lawrence.

  Pre-soyce-ly, Joanna repeated to herself.

  But for once he was serious. He tugged his topee down over his eyes and said in a tone that put her on notice, “To escape all this blasted devotion.”

  6

  KARAKORAM LUGGAGE

  Meade tents, kapok sleeping bags,

  Tarpaulins, blankets, paregoric.

  Flasks of whiskey and canteened water,

  Fodder for beasts of burden.

  Matches, rope and iodine,

  Lanterns and leather gloves.

  Sheepskin hats and long johns,

  Primus stoves and kerosene.

  Twenty pounds of flour, rice,

  Tinned meat and biscuits and cooking oil,

  One trusty Sten Mark II,

  Notes in warring currencies—

  U.S., Russian, Chinese, Turki.

  Now on to the roof of the world!

  Lawrence wrote this on the inside of a Cadbury’s wrapper. He’d brought one dozen candy bars with him from Delhi and rationed us to one every three days. Mem said she would never forget the expression on my face the first time Simon persuaded me to try this dark, ominous food.

  “You look as though you’ve fallen in love.” She smiled in a way—wrinkling her nose—that let me know she was truly smiling and not merely fixing her face in a smile. Then she clenched her hand to her heart and licked her lips to demonstrate her meaning. Lawrence and Simon nodded in agreement, and after that I would forever associate chocolate with happiness.

  For I recognized that I was happy among these people, even as I came to see just how little any of us had to be happy about. Mem’s husband, Simon’s father, was missing. Simon told me that Lawrence had a son who recently had died. And I myself had been missing from my own father for so many years and across so many miles that I hardly dared to believe that Mem and Lawrence could succeed in rejoining us. Yet I took strength from their promise.

  As we climbed higher the weather turned bitter cold. The trail was hard, and the clouds slunk down like low gray hats around the mountaintops. The air tasted of stone coupled with the warm, dank smell of the pack animals. I frequently heard Mem and Simon gasping for breath, and often we stopped for them to rest. At night Lawrence taught us the stars, by day the names of plants and rock formations. Tot taught me and Simon to shoot pebbles across the streams we passed (never down the trail, for fear of sparking an avalanche). Mem helped me with my English. The Muslim woman in her burqa, or upside-down bag, as Simon said, let me hold her baby sometimes while she moved off to relieve herself. And every few hours the father in his embroidered blue skullcap and thickly padded coat would step to the side of the trail, roll out his prayer mat and drop to his knees, and bow and bow in praise of Allah as the rest of the caravan marched past. Tot told us that the Muslim family had walked all the way from China to Mecca to make their hadj and now were on their way home. Their baby was born on the road; they’d been walking for two years. At night when I lay in the tent with Mem and Simon packed in close beside me—the time I loved most of all—I would try to imagine our trek continuing for two years, and I wondered, if that were to happen, would this make me part of Mem’s family?

  The caravan drivers kept to themselves. They wore sheepskins and heavy beards, high leather boots, and astrakhan hats with earflaps. They did not change their clothes or bathe. Crumbs nested in their reddish brown beards, and their laughs shot forth without warning, like flames. They used no tents but piled pack boxes to create rough windbreaks. They liked to rise late, linger over tea, then march well into darkness—all habits that made Lawrence shrug and angered Mem. Simon’s only complaint was the men’s treatment of the animals—they drove them with prods and whips, and bellowed curses when they slowed. Food and water were given only as afterthoughts at the end of each day’s march, and if Simon tried to pet or feed one of the ponies himself, the men would surround him with arms folded high, eyebrows bristling. Some sheathed daggers in their boots. Some were Kashmiri freedom fighters when they were not working as drivers, and none shared this foreign boy’s concern for the welfare of animals, which anyway were expected to die before long. The leader, who went by th
e single name Muhammad, muttered that Simon would do better to worry about his own health, and predicted that he would weaken before the first pass. I chose not to translate this prediction for the others.

  Fortunately, with Lawrence about, Simon had little need of the drivers’ approval. Lawrence had an unmistakable gift for entertaining young boys. He noticed a small cleft in Simon’s left earlobe and proclaimed it a magic door. Coins, sugar cubes, dried beans, and biscuits poured from this “slot” into Lawrence’s hand, much to all our delight. And Lawrence loved to tell stories about the seemingly endless array of characters he carried in his head. The nightly telling and retelling of these stories taught me his language as we all learned of men such as Colonel Alexander Gardiner, who disguised himself in tribal robes and found “adventure through sword and spear.” Or the Indian Pundits who dressed as pilgrims and hid surveying equipment in their prayer wheels that they might secretly map the farthest reaches of the Himalayas for their British masters. Or George Hayward, a British political agent who spent twenty days in the mountains in winter without a tent. Unable to build a fire for lack of fuel, Hayward finally killed his pack yak and ate the meat raw in order to survive. All part of the Great Game, Lawrence would say.

  At first I thought by this term, Great Game, he meant something like the Hindu term, maya, which my flash house sisters had taught me refers to the illusion of earthbound desire. But no, Simon said, the Great Game was more like a secret war. It was real, had taken place in these very mountains over the last hundred years, and Lawrence was writing a book about it. The men whose stories he told to us were all players in this war. Lawrence called them spies, opportunists, and zealots—terms which, he explained, meant they were up to no good, but I could see he admired these men. Perhaps he envied them. Then Simon told me his father was equally handsome and smart and brave, and I found myself wondering if Mem’s missing husband, too, were a hero in this Great Game.

  7

  “Tell me about him,” Lawrence asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s starting to feel like the rhino in the parlor, Jo. The one that everyone knows is there and no one ever mentions.”

  “It. You mean Aidan.” She wedged her hands between her knees and studied the campfire embers. That crushing sensation in her chest, she told herself, was altitude.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to know that you don’t already? He’s your friend, Lawrence.”

  “He’s your husband. You know him better than anyone. Tell me. If Farr hadn’t cabled you about that crash, how long would it have taken you to start worrying?”

  “You mean, how long is his leash?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. But he’s a correspondent. He goes off. It’s what they do. You’re the first wife I know to charge after one of them.”

  “Call it woman’s intuition.”

  “Call it anything you like. My question is why?”

  “He’s my husband, for Christ’s sake! Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Fair enough,” Lawrence said quietly. “But I’m asking why you should.”

  “Because he promised. He…he warned me.”

  “Warned you?”

  “Before we got married. He said, ‘It’s not going to be an ordinary life. Making a home, putting down roots. I’d rather die in my tracks.’”

  “He said that?”

  She reached into the embers with the toe of her boot and attempted to stir them back to life. “I remember we were driving through Rock Creek Park in the old blue Buick I bought when I first arrived in Washington. We were fording a stream. The sunlight cast this dappling like gold feathers spinning through the air, and the water splashed up over the running board, and I opened my door and dragged my hand in it. Silly, really. Aidan just watched me with that smile on his face—the indulgent, affectionate one.”

  “I know it.”

  “And that’s when he warned me: no ordinary life. Only I took it as a promise. We had a picnic that day of Chinese sausage and dumplings that he’d bought in some hole in the wall and kept warm in a thermos, of all things! And a shaker of martinis. We lay on our old tartan blanket most of the afternoon getting pleasantly smashed and talking about all the adventures we’d have, all the places we’d live once the war was over. And I could hardly wait. I imagined… Well, you know the absurd thing is, I imagined being in places just like this.” She batted the cold with the back of one hand, a forefinger indiscriminately cocked at the moon-drenched trail and pale, scattered tents, the tilting immensity of the darkness. “Hard situations. Impossible, even. But we’d be together.”

  Lawrence let out an inscrutable laugh. “You’re an unusual woman, Joanna.”

  “Why? Because the notion of an unconventional marriage excited me?”

  “Because you’re undaunted.”

  “Am I?”

  “Looks that way from where I sit.” He shifted his camp chair as if to improve the view.

  She dug her heels now into the ashes. “Aidan’s the one who’s undaunted. We’d have bang-up fights sometimes about my work, how I could ever expect to accomplish anything meaningful working with one child, one family at a time. I’m sure you’ve heard him talk about the Big Picture.”

  “It has a vaguely familiar ring,” he said wryly, but she was serious.

  “There always has to be a larger scheme. Saving one life isn’t enough if by pulling a few more strings you can save a thousand, or hundreds of thousands. I told him that’s how wars get fought, reducing human lives to numbers, but afterward it’s individuals who have to pick up the pieces.”

  “What strings was he pulling?”

  “Why, his articles, of course. Each time he skewered Chiang Kai-shek, in his mind he was championing the millions who’d been robbed or maimed or killed by Chiang and his warlords. Same when he was writing about Hitler or the Japanese.”

  “We live in large times.”

  “We still suffer one by one—especially children.”

  “He didn’t support your work?”

  She drew in her legs and arms sharply. “I didn’t say that. But he saw it tying me down, holding me back. Occupying me.”

  “Was he jealous?”

  “God, no! I don’t think so. But it was as if he spent his days looking through a wide-angle lens, and I spent mine at the microscope. He said I rescued children because I was still trying to put the pieces of my own childhood together.”

  “And he wasn’t?”

  “That’s what I said! He refused to talk about it, but losing your entire family in the space of six years must be worse than never knowing your parents at all. I felt like I could never get to the bottom of him, you know?”

  “Aidan’s a fascinating man, Jo. If you understood him, he’d bore you, and we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “I suppose…” Her palms fell open on her knees. She stared at their moonlit whiteness. “He was forever searching for evidence that someone in his family had survived. They’d been living in Nanking when Chiang Kai-shek bolted. But after the Japanese were through, the family home was destroyed and every name Aidan tried to contact was either dead or missing. He blamed the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese equally. I think that’s what’s really behind this fixation with his so-called Big Picture. Why I always let him win that fight.”

  “Why?” Lawrence asked.

  “Because he is the child left behind. One way or the other, he’ll devote the rest of his days to picking up his family’s pieces. Naturally, he wants revenge on some larger scale than one life at a time.”

  “Naturally,” Lawrence repeated. “You loved him for that.”

  “For his hatred?”

  “No. For his sense of mission. Even if it was based on revenge.”

  “I love him. Present tense. What does it matter why?”

  “Sometimes the people we love reveal who we are.”

  “So who am I?”

  “A crusader, just like Aidan.”

  “I’m
nothing like Aidan.”

  “But you wish you were… In fact, you envy him.”

  “Yes. I guess I do.”

  After a long pause Lawrence said, “That makes two of us, then.”

  8

  For three days, the route crisscrossed the rapids and sand flats of the Shyok River. The ponies, submerged to their withers, had to be roped together so the torrents of glacial melt wouldn’t sweep them away. The caravan camped on what flat ground was available, and at every stage Joanna searched for evidence that others had been there ahead of them. But though they found plenty of old wrappers and tins, there was nothing to prove that any of these had been discarded by Aidan.

  By the third day, tempers were flaring and the first of the pack animals had to be shot when the rocks beneath him shifted, trapping and breaking his leg. Yet, Joanna observed, the river also gave back life. Eagles and hawks soared overhead, mountain goats, marmots, and wild sheep dotted the hillsides, and cottonwoods, willows, poplars, and wild roses crowded the sloping banks. Human life, too, returned to the landscape as the Shyok dropped to join the Nubra in a long green river valley strung with irrigated fields and whitewashed villages. It was easier to breathe, to think, and after the desolation of the higher trail, the sight of children’s faces, women bending over cook fires, even the tousled glare of a madman seemed to Joanna to signal hope, the possibility of survival against all odds.

  Panamik, the last of these villages, was where the rumors of Aidan’s sighting—and of the subsequent avalanche—had originated. Tot questioned the villagers. Yes, they replied, many, many foreigners were coming through the mountains now. Large groups, small groups, all buying food, ponies, hiring guides. Yes, foreign men, foreign ladies. They grinned, offering eggs and vegetables for sale. Yes, they emphatically nodded, they had seen a man matching Aidan’s picture. Yes, he looked very well, bought many eggs and breads and vegetables. Joanna suspected they would have said anything to make a sale, but Tot brought forth an elderly woman who insisted that her son had gone with Aidan to serve as his guide.