Adam's Peak

by Heather Burt

  “How far is it to the top?” he said.

  The girl widened her eyes and turned to her brother, who deliberated a moment in silence. “Uh, not too far,” he said. “I think we left there about half an hour ago. Maybe a bit more. I’m not too sure.”

  “It gets super-steep near the end, though,” the girl added. “But there’s railings for that part, and you’re pretty much finished by then, so it’s not so bad.”

  Rudy glanced at his uncle, who seemed not to be paying much attention. He considered asking the brother and sister, diplomatically, if they thought the climb would be too difficult for an elderly man, but decided that their judgment on that matter wasn’t likely to be any more reliable than their sense of distance.

  “Well, we’d better get going,” he said instead, adjusting the straps of his knapsack. “Enjoy the rest of your trip.”

  “Yeah, you too!”The girl waved, then she and her brother carried on down the steps, quick and agile as mountain goats.

  “Are you still up for this, Uncle?” Rudy said. “We could turn back.”

  In answer, Uncle Ernie jabbed the end of his walking stick into the uphill slope and took three of the steps at once. Rudy limped behind, scanning the forest for a stick of his own. As they climbed, neither able to see the face of the other, he imagined himself in a confessional. Ernie was the aging priest, familiar, but mysterious nonetheless; Rudy himself was the muddled confessant, struggling at that moment to sort out the peculiar restlessness that his conversation with the teenagers had fuelled.

  “You know, Uncle,” he began, “I expected that moving back to Sri Lanka would be different than it’s actually been.”

  “Is that so?” Uncle Ernie said, his tone appropriately neutral.

  “I think I expected that coming back here would give me a sense of who I really am. But it hasn’t really worked out that way.”

  “Hmm. You’re having what they call an identity crisis then.”

  Rudy couldn’t tell if his uncle was making fun of him or not. He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I guess that’s what it is. It sounds pretty corny.”

  “Not necessarily. What were you hoping would happen back here?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I thought I could slide back in where I left off when I was six. Become an older version of that kid.”

  “Ah. Well. Picking up where one left off isn’t so easy. Too much water under the bridge, as it were.”

  “Yeah. I suspect that kid I left behind drowned ages ago.” He sighed noisily, partly in disgruntlement, partly in pain. “I never really thought about it this way when I left, but I actually believed I’d step off the plane and there’d be some kind of mystical Sri Lankan vibe connecting me to everything.” He paused, recognizing in his words the very thinking for which he’d criticized Kanda. His tone became mocking. “I thought I’d be in my groove.”

  “And I take it that didn’t happen? Your groove?”

  “Well, obviously I didn’t feel like a complete stranger. But no, it hasn’t been what I was hoping for.”

  As if in affirmation of what he’d been saying, Rudy lost his footing on the steps and fell forward onto his hands, shaving his palms on the wet stone. He swore at the sudden cold sting and the jolt to his wrists. Uncle Ernie turned around.

  “All right?”

  Rudy wiped his palms down the front of his trousers. “I’m fine. Just clumsy.”

  He squinted ahead at the point where the muddy stairway was swallowed into the cloud mass; he massaged his hip. He suspected that if he were to plead fatigue, or pain, or wimpiness, Uncle Ernie would agree to turn back. But stubborn pride, and a niggling fear that he’d regret the retreat, prevented him from making the plea himself.

  “Are you still sure you want to continue, Uncle? From what those kids were saying, it sounds like we’re still quite far from the top. I don’t mind turning around.”

  Uncle Ernie pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and shook it out vigorously.

  “Stop worrying about me, Nephew. I’m not an invalid.” He mopped the rainwater from his face, muffling his words. “In fact, I’m jolly glad we’re coming up here out of season. I’m all for this kind of thing. Man against the elements. No modern conveniences to dull the senses. I’m telling you, Rudy, this is better than battling hordes of drunken pilgrims for a full night. Builds character.”

  Listening to his uncle’s litany of clichés, Rudy stared at the ground. He tried to imagine what had happened to the sensitive, quirky artist of Aunty Mary’s recollections. He wanted to tell Ernie that he understood, that there was no need to pretend; he wanted to tell him about Adam. And yet the possibility remained—not entirely absurd—that Ernie wasn’t pretending. That somewhere along the line he had changed. Or perhaps, Rudy considered, the young man who’d been capable of giggling and prattling like a village woman at the market was also capable of blustering like an old army general.

  “I’m up for it if you are,” he said, and they carried on.

  The rain let up a little, and for a while the voice urging him forward, as clear and real to him as the dripping vegetation, was his grandfather’s. To climb Adam’s Peak is to conquer one’s demons, the old man was saying, but Rudy found that the words, on him, were lost. If he had demons at all, they were of a fat, indolent breed that neither chased him down nor haunted his soul, but rather clung to his skin like leeches. He recalled that the entry in Grandpa’s diary hadn’t actually referred to demons at all but to “weaknesses,” a more suitable term. Demons had no interest in him; they were for people like Alec Vantwest.

  His thoughts began to drift, back to Morgan Hill Road, but Uncle Ernie cut them off.

  “You were saying you feel out of place here.”

  Rudy stooped to pick up a discarded walking stick, a slender tree trunk trimmed of its branches. It was on the short side, but it worked well enough. “Oh. Yeah,” he answered absently. Like the rain, his confessional mood had subsided. If he couldn’t ponder in silence, he wanted Ernie to talk, to start clearing up some mysteries.

  “But what about you, Uncle? What was it like moving to England? Did you feel you belonged there?”

  “So you know I was in England?”

  “You mentioned it when you came to the house.” Rudy planted his stick rhythmically, pleased with the momentum it gave him. “And Aunty Mary told me. She said you were a teacher there.”

  Uncle Ernie gave a quizzical grunt. “I conducted evening classes in painting. She must be thinking of that. No, I worked for the Ministry of Agriculture. Government job.”

  Rudy hesitated, flustered by the implications of each perfunctory piece of information, wondering which thread to pursue. “Was it the job that took you to England?” he said at length.

  “In part. There were boatloads of us ex-colonials returning to the homeland after independence. The British were offering passports.”

  “The homeland? But it wouldn’t have seemed like home, would it?”

  “No less than Ceylon,” Uncle Ernie said, matter-of-factly. “I had a good job, a decent flat in London. The country was a mess, I’m telling you—decimated work force, end of the empire and all—but very interesting. England had to be rebuilt from the ground up, like a new civilization if you will.”

  Ernie’s progress up the mountain had slowed. Pausing, Rudy tore through a clump of dark, leafy vines with the end of his walking stick. He suspected his uncle had fascinating stories to tell about post-war Britain, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to hear.

  “Why did you come back?” he said.

  Ernie looked skyward. “Got fed up with the weather.”

  “The weather?”

  “Damp, cold. Like this. I put up with it while I was there, but you know, Rudy, chaps like you and I simply fare better in the equatorial climate. The English are miserable here, but you and I, we thrive. It isn’t just a matter of skin pigmentation either. I’ve seen the same characteristics in very fair-skinned Burghers, chaps as pale as the Engli
sh. Yes—there’s something else we’ve acquired over the generations, something in our metabolism.”

  They’d reached another clearing, an abandoned tea stop probably, and Rudy, grateful for the distraction, shook off his knapsack and took out his water bottle. While his uncle relieved himself behind some shrubs, he lifted the lid of a rough wooden crate in the futile hope of discovering some food. They’d not yet finished off the package of tea biscuits, but the dry, bland rectangles served only to stir up wistful thoughts of cousin Bernadette’s beef inferno and coconut sambol. Predictably the crate was empty, and there was nothing to be found in the mess of planks scattered next to it. Rudy took a swig of water and turned his attention to a blue plastic tarp covering part of the clearing. The tarp, which had apparently served as a barrier between the now-dismantled tea stand and the tangle of vegetation behind it, was strung at one end to a scrawny tree that had fallen across the clearing. Massaging his hip in the drizzling rain, Rudy studied the incongruous sheet of plastic on the mulchy ground. He returned the water bottle to his knapsack. Then he crouched and began picking at the wet knot that attached the tarp to the fallen tree. Uncle Ernie’s muddy loafers appeared next to him.

  “What’s this, men? What are you doing?”

  Rudy looked up. “I thought I’d take this thing with us. Not that we’ll—I mean, we can still turn back.”

  “You’re expecting we might spend the night here?”

  If anything, the old man seemed excited by the prospect.

  Rudy grimaced. “I hope not.”

  He desperately hoped not. Sri Pada in the middle of night would be a thoroughly inhospitable place. And yet, as before, he was incapable of doing anything to avoid it, of breaking his inertia and making a decision that would prevent what would certainly be a miserable, even dangerous, experience. They would keep climbing, he supposed, either until they reached the summit or until progress became physically impossible.

  Uncle Ernie went to the other end of the tarp, attached to a sturdier tree, and set to work on the knot. “Best to be prepared, though,” he called over his shoulder. “This is good thinking, Rudy. We can rig a shelter out of this.”

  They folded the tarp, and Rudy crammed it into his knapsack. He sent his uncle on ahead, then he unzipped his trousers and urinated in the middle of the clearing, facing the trail, daring hypothetical strangers to make a sudden appearance. The sensible part of him wished they would. Some pilgrims or hikers heading back to the base would shake him up. You’re crazy, they’d say. No time to get up there now; come back down with us.When he’d zipped up his fly and no one had appeared, he wondered vaguely if it would be most practical to set up camp immediately, right there in the clearing, while there was still light—fashion a tent out of the planks and the tarp, start scouring the forest for edible plants, drying some sticks to make a fire. The sort of things they must have taught in Boy Scouts. But the Boy Scout ethos, Rudy decided, wasn’t designed for circumstances such as his. With a sigh, he picked up his walking stick and carried on, up the interminable steps.

  For a stretch of time that might have been two minutes or twenty, as he fell farther and farther behind his uncle, he managed to think of the climbing itself as the objective. He discovered a quiet satisfaction in the measured, meditative planting of his feet and his stick, while even the pain in his hip took on a necessary and gratifying role. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, he repeated to himself every few steps, like a mantra. But the final steep approach, for which chain-link railings had been installed, broke his trance. He jettisoned the stick and took hold of the iron chain. If the Toronto girl’s recollections could be trusted, they were almost at the summit, though apart from the railings there was nothing to signal an impending climax. The cloud mass was thicker than ever—they’d actually entered it—while wet branches drooping across the stairway gave the impression that they were being swallowed into the mountain. Hauling himself forward, Rudy tried to recreate the sense of triumph his grandfather had experienced in February 1944. When that failed, he remembered, almost too late, the true purpose of the climb: he was here for Adam. The gruelling ascent was an act of atonement. He couldn’t have talked himself out of it if he’d wanted to.

  To compensate for his negligence, he concentrated all of his attention and the remainder of his energy on his brother. He pictured Adam in his hospital bed, rested and serene, and imagined that with each near-vertical step he took, he was dragging his brother up from the depths of his languor, up through the enigmatic recovery levels. He started at level one, to be thorough, and gradually advanced, through stages marked by particular degrees of “confusion” and “agitation,” toward level eight, that peak of “purposeful—appropriate” behaviour, according to the Rancho Los Amigos scale. It was hard to know how many steps to allot each level, for the end of the stairway remained stubbornly out of sight. He devoted several to the first five, then, worried that he’d reach the summit before he was done, he decreased the allotment. Between five and six, he slowed down to wipe unexpected streams of sweat from his face. He saw Adam out of bed, walking and conversing. Approaching level seven, he gripped the railing tighter and planted his feet with leaden purpose, while in his imagination Adam steered Zoë like an airplane through the rooms of the house. At level eight, he wasn’t yet at the summit, but the mist had thinned, and he’d spotted a small building up ahead. It wasn’t the fanciful pavilion of Uncle Ernie’s painting, but it was enough.

  “Come on, machan,” he whispered. “This is for you. Adam’s Peak.”

  As he climbed the remaining steps, he returned to the day of the last afternoon tea on his grandfather’s lawn. Not the time he spent listening to Grandpa read from his diary, but what came after that: sitting on the lawn next to his father while his sister and cousins squabbled on their makeshift cricket pitch; the news, delivered quietly, without fuss, that Mum was to have a baby, and the parental good sense with which Dad allowed him to choose the baby’s name. In the rain and the dark grey gloom, he took a final step, and he was there. He leaned his forehead against the locked chain-link gate at the end of the route and caught his breath.

  But as his lungs calmed and his legs went rubbery beneath him, the rest of him—creepingly, insidiously—mutinied. His stomach cramped and his throat strained; his eyes stung. He couldn’t have imagined how it would be when he started out on his pilgrimage, but the reality now was glaring: his achievement was meaningless. He’d made it to the summit of Adam’s Peak, was undeniably planted there, thousands of feet high, but what did it matter? For all the formidable exertion, his brother was no better off. Nothing had changed; nothing had been proven. The climb was useless. Even worse, this uselessness that now poisoned the very contact between the soles of his shoes and the final step of the ascent was merely a symptom of something bigger. As a brother, as a son, a teacher, a lover ... he’d failed. The top of Sri Pada might just as well have been the middle of a deserted, frozen plain. Rudy himself might just as well have been lost in his brother’s mysterious world. Confused, agitated, exhausted, he coughed and gasped and struck his forehead against the gate.

  IN THEORY, THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH TIME for a fit young person to get back to the base before nightfall. Uncle Ernie might even have made it, on his own. As things stood, though, Ernie had engaged the gatekeeper in a conversation, in the hope that the man would make his tiny shed available as an overnight rest house. Rudy slouched on a bench in the shed, staring out at the darkening sky, under which his uncle and the gate-keeper talked and smoked in the fog, like film noir characters. The inside of the wood plank hut was plastered with newspaper and magazine clippings. Most of them were in Sinhala or Tamil. The few English ones seemed to be about the peak itself, though one rogue article featured the headline “Dozens Killed in Jungle Battle Near Trincomalee.” Rudy dared not read it. Turning away, he concentrated on his own agonies.

  His hip was throbbing, and the hot pain radiated down his thigh and across his lower back. Stopping for tea in the
gatekeeper’s shed had done it. Given a taste of immobility, his body had packed it in and refused to go on. If the gatekeeper proved unable or unwilling to give them shelter, he and his uncle would be spending the night under the plastic tarp, in less hospitable conditions than the clearing down the mountain had offered. Or Rudy would, anyway, for there would be nothing stopping Ernie from returning to the car.

  It did seem likely, however, that the gatekeeper would oblige. It had to be a lonely post, guarding the sacred footprint out of season, and the man had appeared pleased, in a quiet way, to have visitors. When they arrived, he’d escorted them, barefoot, to the pavilion that housed the print, which was marked, as the Toronto girl had described it, by a large stone slab, vaguely shaped like a foot. “Real footprint is underneath,” the gatekeeper had informed them. The stone was strewn with coins and marigolds, hints of a devotion that Rudy could scarcely imagine. But though the relic held no spiritual meaning for him, he found the entire scene moving. Fierce gusts of wind now tore through the fog and drizzle, and when he rang the heavy bell hanging outside the pavilion—once, for his sole ascent of the peak—he imagined himself and his two companions as the only survivors of some destroyed civilization, banished to this harsh outcrop of land and charged with the responsibility of carrying on as best they could.

  The fantasy was fleeting, though. When the gatekeeper touched his arm and said, “You like tea?” Rudy could have hugged the man. He took a last look at the grey nothingness beyond the bell, then he limped hurriedly back to the gate, where he and his uncle had left their shoes and socks.

  The gatekeeper’s shed was furnished with two wooden benches, which formed an L around a small table. Another table was cluttered with magazines, mugs, tins of tea supplies, and a Primus stove on which water was boiled. The tea was good strong Ceylon stuff, and the longer Rudy had sat drinking it in the unexpected comfort of the shed, the clearer it had become that he’d never make it back down the mountain without a very long rest. He’d explained his predicament to his uncle, at which point Ernie and the gatekeeper had gone outside to smoke, leaving the rickety door ajar.