Beyond the summit: An Everest adventure and Romance

by Linda LeBlanc

  Beth laughed. “I bet they’re rivals for the heart of some Sherpani.” She alerted Dorje, but instead of rushing to squash the inevitable conflict, he asked her to quietly point out the two porters involved so he could observe the fun. She stood agape as he explained they often played such tricks. It was expected and relieved their boredom. Shaking her head, she whipped her notebook out and wrote. The people are even more incredible than the mountains. I’m ashamed of myself for grouping them all as porters and not seeing individuals. They are what I will carry home in my heart, not pictures of Everest.

  After cautiously crossing two wire suspension bridges and a narrow cantilever bridge with no handrails, they headed along the stony bed of the valley until they came to the confluence of two rivers below the mountain wall upon which the unseen Namche perched. “It is very steep from here and very high,” Dorje warned as he relieved the ladies of their daypacks. “You will get sick if you do not go bistarai, bistarai and drink much water.”

  Eric’s ego apparently still suffering, he announced, “I’m going ahead and will meet you in Namche.”

  Despite Dorje’s warnings, he took off at full speed and Beth didn’t see him after that. Thirty minutes into the walk, her thighs and calves were burning. Feeling slightly nauseated and with a pounding headache, she collapsed against a boulder and watched the barefoot porters pass with a steady gait, eyes to the ground, no surfeit of breath for conversation, but a shared rock joke that turned up the corners of their mouths. Perhaps that’s what kept them going. She was still exhausted when Dorje arrived with Ruth and Helen.

  “You two are incredible,” Beth said, wiping her brow with the bottom of her shirt. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.” As soon as she uttered the words, the last porter bearing rocks trudged past. She just shook her head in disbelief. “How much do they get paid for this torture?” she asked Dorje and found the answer unfathomable: six rupees a day for 60 kilos.2

  More notes for her journal. Porters are supermen. Ashamed and feeling like a whiner, she pushed off the wall and plodded on up the trail.

  “Most porters are farmers,” Dorje explained walking beside her. “They cannot grow enough to feed their families. So when tourists come, they leave home to work.”

  Beth was embarrassed. An educated woman who traveled the world, she had come here with a mindset that was quickly unraveling. “Is it worth leaving their families?”

  Staring at the ground, Dorje rolled both shoulders inward with a kind of shrug. “Most go back with very little. Every day, they must pay for food and a place to sleep. Their only hope is to get tips from trekkers.”

  “Were you ever a porter?”

  With a defensive glance out of the corner of his eye, he replied, “Yes, at sixteen when I came back to Namche and spoke no English.” As if she had criticized him, he left and walked with the non-judgmental ladies. Damn. Her offending tongue had struck again. She’d better get control of it soon because Dorje was an important element of what she’d come for. She’d sensed that from the first moment in Lukla.

  CHAPTER 7

  Dorje dropped back to Ruth and Helen because walking with Beth was too stimulating and uncomfortable. When she wiped sweat from her forehead, the top of her shirt had ballooned out giving him a full view of her breasts, soft and white like fresh nak cream. Even discussing the plight of porters hadn’t provided enough distraction and he had to erase her from his thoughts. Her question about whether he’d been a porter opened doors he couldn’t shut now anyway, so he hauled images from the corners of his brain that had to be dealt with eventually.

  Climbing the Namche hill reminded him of returning home at sixteen. After fighting one more monsoon flood that washed away their crops and destroyed the terraces, he couldn’t face starting over again and had to leave the Solu even though it meant being separated from his mother who refused to go without her new husband. His brother Nima was like his other half and could not be left behind. Together they simply headed north and slept in the woods, hungry and cold, with no destination in mind.

  “Back to Namche?” Nima exclaimed when Dorje suggested it one night.

  “Haven’t you ever wondered about father?”

  “I was only three when we left. I don’t even remember him.”

  “And I was six but I remember everything, like him promising to come to the Solu and see us as often as he could.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t for some reason.”

  “What could have been more important than his sons? You’re too soft and forgiving like mother. The truth is he simply didn’t love us enough.”

  “If that’s how you feel, why do you want to see him?”

  Rolling onto his side away from Nima, he answered, “Because I have to.” He moved his hip off a stone and pillowed his hands under his head. “Because I have to.”

  As they headed north the next day, Dorje pondered Nima’s idea that Mingma couldn’t come for some reason. For ten years he’d gone over every possibility and always arrived at the same conclusion. His father simply didn’t care. The emptiness created by Mingma’s absence was so immense that Dorje was lost in it and couldn’t find his way out. A young boy’s yearning for his father had waged a ten-year war with his feelings of abandonment and anger. By the time he and Nima started the final climb to Namche, his emotions were in tatters.

  Rounding the last hill, they stared at the collection of seventy houses built on terraces. “Which house is it?” Nima asked.

  Dorje remembered it being up high but which one? The two-story, rectangular buildings all looked the same. After dreaming about returning home a thousand times, he felt like a stranger in his own land. He glanced at the white jagged peaks thrusting into the sky. Snow. He hadn’t seen that since they left. Near the spring where their mother had washed clothes, light-skinned tourists inhabited a forest of orange and blue tents. Watching young children ready to bolt at a stranger’s move, he wondered if any of them could hop on one foot as well as he had.

  Thinking about that day with Hillary, he suddenly heard Nima shout, “I know where he is.” With a quick grin displaying the whistling space between his two upper front teeth, he added, “I asked somebody.”

  Trying to quell the riot in his stomach, Dorje hooked his arm around his brother’s neck and took a large shaky breath. “Let’s go find him.”

  “He’s in that teahouse playing cards but I don’t know which one he is.”

  But as soon as they stepped under the low doorway, Dorje knew his father. Seated at a long table, six men were playing cards. Although others had adopted short hair and western clothing from tourists, Mingma sat in his blood-red robe, his long, black hair still pulled back and secured with a ribbon, as striking and handsome as ever with his perfect square features and glinting dark eyes. At the shock of finally seeing his father again, Dorje’s entire being grew faint.

  “So which one?” Nima whispered.

  Taking a tremulous breath, Dorje acted as though he wasn’t sure. He needed a few more minutes to absorb Mingma's presence unobserved. One of the men dealt cards. As Mingma slid each one into his hand, his eyes skimmed the room, passing over Dorje and Nima with no sign of recognition. He picked up the cards and sorted them. The first player tossed one to the center of the table. Each player in turn slapped his harder than the one before until the last man stood and threw his card down so hard it bent in the middle. Apparently Mingma had won. While shuffling for the next hand, his gaze settled on the boys momentarily.

  “Well?” Nima insisted.

  His thoughts and words still too fragmented, Dorje wasn’t ready yet. He tried to gather them up but they scurried in confusion. Before he could corner them, his brother grew impatient and spoke. “Mingma?”

  Everyone turned in their direction.

  “Yes,” answered their father in a voice so full and round it filled the room. “Who wants to know?”

  “Your sons,” replied Dorje, his heart drumming painfully in his chest.

  Le
aning back in his chair, Mingma studied them a moment. “I knew you’d come some day. I’ve been waiting.”

  If his father hadn’t said that word waiting, Dorje might have held himself together. All the years of standing by the path, aching to see that robe sweeping towards him, could not be forgotten. “What do you know of waiting?” he said, his voice gnarling around the words. “I watched and waited ten long years. Where were you?”

  Quietly studying his son’s face, Mingma said nothing.

  The silence bolstered Dorje’s courage. “Do you remember a three and six year old being dragged down the stairs crying?”

  “Yes.”

  Although he’d practiced the speech a hundred times in his head, it stumbled out in clumps of words with pauses, jumps, and starts. “And do you remember telling us how we must be brave? You said you loved us and you promised to come see us as often as you could.”

  The card players quickly moved to the door and crowded to get down the stairs. Mingma’s face remained rigid, his gaze unwavering. “What do you want from me?”

  “Something to eat,” Nima answered before Dorje could utter another word.

  Their father nodded, looking only at his younger son. “And a place to sleep?”

  “Yes. We’re tired.”

  Relieved the two of them had shut him out for the moment, Dorje knew he would have said more hurtful things and this wasn’t how he wanted it to be. He wanted to feel like a six-year-old, loving child again.

  Mingma rose from the table. “Let’s go home.”

  Home! Dorje’s last moments there had been in his father’s lap, crying and begging to stay. Their house stood atop the highest terrace on the east side of the village. As Dorje climbed the narrow, steep path lined with stone fences, all the smells flooded back: barley roasting, snowflakes falling, warm steam coming from the animal’s nostrils, the dust churned up by their hooves. Reaching the house, he paused in front, hearing voices from the lower storage room next to the animals.

  “Who’s that?” he asked after having remained silent since leaving the teahouse.

  “Tibetan refugees,” his father replied. “They arrive hungry and cold with nothing but a few clothes. Many of their children died while crossing over the Nangpa La. I let them stay here until they’ve recovered enough to move on to other parts of Nepal or India, as far from the Chinese as they can get.”

  Dorje’s anger softened thinking his father may have sheltered hundreds in the nine years since the uprising. Entering the dark, lower room where animals were kept at night, he felt the familiar warmth of their bodies. He’d missed nuzzling against their dense outer coats and tasting their sweet nak curds. Brushing against them, he worked his way to the winding staircase that led to the living quarters on the second floor.

  As he ducked under the doorway, he discovered something unexpected. A heavy woman with a bulbous growth on her neck as thick as an arm was making chapatis. Mingma introduced their aunt, Droma Sunjo. “And this is your cousin Dawa,” he added when a short, squat body that seemed all out of proportion ambled out of the corner, tilting awkwardly left and right. A large, bloated stomach forced the truncated limbs outward. It was a boy of about twelve with thin hair and dry skin of an odd yellowish hue. The puffy face with thick lips and flattened nose crinkled into a vacant smile.

  Nima tugged the back of Dorje’s shirt and whispered, “What is it? A pem?”

  “Don’t know,” Dorje whispered back. “Maybe a witch cursed them.”

  Mingma spoke. “There’s salt tea and thukpa on the hearth. Take what you want.”

  After two days of hunger, the promise of noodle dumplings in potato stew flavored with sheep fat overrode fear and revulsion. They agreed to eat and stay the night. When the hearth fire burned out, Droma Sunjo put mats on the floor for Dorje and Nima. Mingma didn’t join her in the sleeping alcove but lit a butter lamp and sat on the window seat with two piles of Tibetan scripture on the low table before him. Reciting the text in a low monotone, he moved the pages with both hands from one pile to the other. Although Dorje lay in the familiar room, it wasn’t the same with these two strangers. He no longer knew the father he had longed to see and couldn’t jump into his lap to soak up his warmth or feel him gently stroking his forehead. As Dorje watched Mingma, the flame from the butter lamp cast shadows across his father’s face, making him appear more distant and removed. If only Dorje could take back those first few words in the teahouse.

  Lost in those memories, he now plodded up the hill until Ruth’s scream jolted him back to reality. Whipping around, he saw Helen on the ground inches from a 500-foot cliff. “What happened?”

  Trembling, Ruth said, “She was complaining about feeling awful and just dropped.”

  Her face pale and listless, Helen whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  Scared and not knowing what to do, Dorje helped her sit. “Do not worry.”

  “I feel a little better now. I think the chemo just took more out of me than we realized.”

  He didn’t know this word chemo but sensed it was a bad thing. “Do you want to go back to Lukla . . . or on up to Namche?”

  “Namche. I came to see the monks.”

  “I will carry you.” With no doko available, he squatted and told her to hang onto his neck with her legs around his waist, the way he’d carried Nima when young.

  “I will be too heavy.”

  “No. Much lighter than a porter’s load.” He rose and shifted her weight to make them both comfortable and continue upward.

  Assuming the slow but steady gait adopted by porters, Dorje and Ruth arrived with Helen. As he walked into Namche, he realized nothing had changed since his first day back four years ago. Neither he nor his father had bridged the chasm created that night and probably never would. The two ladies waved their walking sticks over their heads with such bravura that Dorje swallowed the proud tears welling in his throat. He took Helen to her tent and instructed the cook to boil water for tea and biscuits because she wasn’t doing well.

  Beth joined them and asked if there was a doctor nearby. Staring straight into her wild-blue-poppy eyes, he told her of the hospital in Khunde built by Hillary just two years earlier.

  “Is it far?”

  “Sherpa time or yours?”

  “Mine.”

  “I can go in thirty minutes. You are a good walker. Maybe one hour if not too tired.”

  “So you’ll take Eric and me? He’s got a horrible headache and nausea and I want to talk to the doctor about Helen.”

  Having warned Eric about going too fast, Dorje contained the chuckle gurgling in his throat. The man deserved to get sick but Helen didn’t, and she was his priority. Here was a chance to be alone with Beth for several hours. Of course he’d take her but not with Eric tagging along. “Eric is sick from going too high too fast. Khunde is even higher. He must rest here today and tomorrow, but I will take you to ask about Helen.”

  While Beth talked to Eric and prepared to leave, Dorje rushed down to the spring. Two Sherpanis slapping clothes against the rocks giggled and flirted with him as he dunked his head in to wash his hair and splashed ice-cold water on his face. Another time, he might have returned their attention, but not today. The American with honey-golden hair consumed all his thoughts.

  CHAPTER 8

  Crawling into the tent, Beth found Eric face down on his sleeping bag, breathing heavily as if struggling for air. “Still feeling rotten?”

  “I want to puke.”

  “Dorje says you’re sick because you went too high too fast.”

  “Good for him. Mr. Know-it-all.”

  “I’m sorry, Sweetie,” she said and lightly ran the back of her hand down his cheek. “Rest and keep drinking fluids.” If she told him about planning to hike higher yet today, he’d throw an understandable fit. Best to just let him sleep undisturbed.

  She waited outside for Dorje as he walked up from the spring with glistening, wet hair. Watching his confident stride, she wanted to know everything about
him. What was his childhood like? Was he married or did he have a girlfriend? What drove him to despair and what brought him happiness? Rarely hesitant about probing into someone’s personal life, she had offended a number of people with her directness. So once again she had to wrestle her brazen tongue into place and stick to cultural and historical questions, the stuff she was paid to do. Asking about the hospital, she learned that before Hillary built the one in Khunde, the nearest doctor had been eight days away. Slightly nauseated and plagued by a headache by the time they reached the long stone building overlooking the village, she was much too stubborn and independent to admit to such weakness.