Right of Thirst

by Frank Huyler

  “Thank you, Ali,” I said, as I wiped my mouth on the napkin.

  “Finish?” he said, smiling, bobbing his head, coming forward to the table.

  “Yes, finished.”

  “Okay,” he said, and put my dishes on the tray. Then he was gone, out through the door into the snow with my dishes in his arms. The whole of it embarrassed me—his stinking feet, his obeisance, the way he stood and waited for me to finish my breakfast with such patience. He was poor, he was there for the money, and I’m sure it was going into the mouths of his wife and children somewhere in the slums, but I wished he hadn’t stood there like that, and I wished I hadn’t so utterly ignored him as I ate my fill. Suddenly, I thought of Eric, standing in his white dress shirt and pressed black pants—yes, sir. There are several specials this evening. But of course it wasn’t the same, not even close. Ali waited by a distance he could never in this world hope to cross. I was sure there was no dream behind his indignity, and I doubted whether he even felt indignity at all. He just stood there and watched.

  Already the tracks I’d left from my tent were filling in. But it was only a few hundred yards to the main body of the tents, and if I missed them I could simply keep going until I reached the end of the field, then trace my way back along the side of the cliff. So I set off, in my hat and heavy down jacket. In a few minutes I was entirely in my own world, lost in my own breath. I felt as if I was wading through shallow water, with flakes as large as leaves falling to pieces as they struck my clothes, clinging to my eyelashes and eyebrows. I tried to walk straight ahead, paying close attention. Several times I turned around to examine my tracks, satisfying myself that I wasn’t wandering in circles. But then I heard voices in the expanse before me, and followed them to the first of the tents.

  It was three men from the village. They were knocking the snow off the roofs of the tents with spare wooden tent poles. At first, they didn’t see me. One man, shorter than the others, was having difficulty reaching high enough with his pole, and the others were laughing at him. Their faces were flushed and damp from exertion, they looked young and happy and unreserved in their ragged clothes and their round wool hats and their off-colored eyes. For an instant I was tempted to retreat into the snowstorm—I felt abruptly self-conscious, as if I were about to enter a room of strangers at a black-tie affair—but then one of them saw me, and said something to the others. They turned around, and fell silent, and the door closed.

  “Hello,” I managed, with an awkward wave of my gloved hand.

  “Hello,” one of them replied, bowing his head before looking up at me again.

  “Captain Rai?” I asked.

  They didn’t understand.

  “Captain Rai?” I said again. The short man muttered something.

  “Rai,” one of the taller men said, as it came to him, pointing down the row. “Rai.”

  I thanked them. They bowed their heads; they smiled and did not meet my eye. It was many degrees below freezing, they were brushing the snow off the tents and banging it loose with wooden sticks, it was all over them, and yet they were hardly dressed. No gloves, the thinnest of shoes, and it didn’t touch them. They were like birds, in the dead of winter, with pale bloodless feet clasped tight to the wire.

  Rai and Elise were with the rest of the villagers at the northern end of the tent city. The snow made it difficult to set up more tents, so Rai had set them to work clearing the roofs. They walked back and forth down the rows with their sticks. How long he would keep them at it was unclear; the snow showed no sign of relenting. Elise held a pole, and was pitching in with the rest, but Rai stood empty-handed, hooded in his parka, some distance from the others.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning,” he replied, shortly.

  “How are the tents holding up?”

  “It is snowing heavily. But if we keep the loads down probably they will be okay.”

  The tents were standing, but the roofs bowed beneath the weight, straining the lines that held them to the ground. The villagers were entering the tents with their poles, and lifting the roofs from within. From a distance, the tents swelled, and the powder slid off them.

  “It’s a good thing they’re empty,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Can you imagine what it would be like if we had two thousand people here? In this?”

  “Then they could clean their own tents,” he said. “I would not have to do it for them.”

  He paused to light a cigarette, then continued.

  “This will delay them,” he said. “They will not be able to cross the passes until the snow melts.”

  “How long will we have to wait?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Elise had seen me.

  “Here,” she said, trudging toward us, handing me her pole. She was breathing hard, her face red and wet from melted snow. “Help us.”

  “Good morning, Elise,” I said.

  “Sanjit will not work,” she said, looking at Rai. “He is lazy.”

  Rai smiled. I would have thought that such a comment would be an affront to his dignity, but he was playing along.

  “If you were my wife,” he said, “you would not be talking so much.”

  She laughed.

  I smiled along, surprised by their playfulness. And I felt something else—a clear wave of jealousy. It came over me without warning. I had hardly seen them exchange two words since we’d arrived in this place, and yet now, suddenly they were joking like old friends.

  “I’m going to rest,” she said, handing me the pole. “I am going to the tent.”

  Rai shook his head and looked pleased as she walked away.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m going to get started.”

  I set off by myself. It wasn’t heavy work, but it was enough to make me unzip the front of my jacket, and stop for a breather every now and then. I stepped alone into the cold dark interiors, one after another, pushing the broom slowly into the sagging canvas overhead, and let the snow roll off. It was far too cold for the snow to melt, and in that we were fortunate. Wet snow would have soaked the tents through. But Rai was right; the snow was dry, and poured off the roofs like salt.

  The snow-covered canvas muffled all sound. I could hear nothing from the outside world. It was satisfying to stand inside them, and push the pole against the roof, and feel the weight of the snow slide off to nothing with a long sigh. As I entered them one after the other, with all the snow and quiet around me, they reminded me of ruins, or the cells of catacombs, deep underground, as if people had once lived there, and left long ago.

  Back home, a few weeks before the trip, I’d rented a film about a biology professor who’d spent his life studying the burrows of ants. I’d liked the man, and his passion, and his awkwardness on camera, and the pleasure he so clearly took in his work. He was soothing, somehow, and I’d watched the film twice before I sent it back.

  The professor’s idea was both simple and elegant. He and his graduate student filled a wheelbarrow with their equipment and pushed it out to the ant mound. Then, carefully, the professor shoveled off the top of the mound until the central tunnel was exposed, ants flowing everywhere. Meanwhile, his assistant turned on the gas burner in the wheelbarrow and melted a bar of lead in a crucible.

  It took a while for the lead to melt, and during this time the professor talked a bit about his research, in his slow Southern drawl, about the biomass of insects on this earth and ants in particular, how generally important they were, and how little was known about them. And yet they were among the most intricate of living systems in the world. They were born to their roles, and followed them without pain, without regret or choice or pleasure, and yet they were alive. They had fascinated him since he was a small boy. The assistant boiled and stirred the lead. It looked like molten silver, or mercury, and when it got hot it was runny and thin, not thick and slow like I might have expected. At night, I imagined that it would have glowed, but in daylight it was simply shiny.
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  Once the lead was ready, the assistant handed a galvanized steel funnel, with a handle attached, to the professor. The handle was long enough that the professor didn’t have to bend. He held the funnel over the exposed tunnel, then nodded to his assistant.

  “This is the delicate part,” he said for the benefit of the camera. “The lead cools quickly, so it has to be done just right.”

  The assistant was careful with his tongs and his crucible, pouring the lead into the funnel as the professor held the funnel steady and let the single bright thread flow into the ground.

  “It took us a while to figure out how much lead to use,” the professor said. “And how hot to make it.”

  When the cup of lead was gone, the professor looked at his watch.

  “Now we wait,” he said, putting the funnel back into the wheelbarrow.

  They walked between the narrow trunks of young pines. The earth was red. The biology professor digressed a bit—he talked about sawtooth pine and spruce pine, he talked about grasslands and periodic fires and the good they do for ecological systems. He talked about how one system is related to another, and how you can’t change one without the other, which he said we were just beginning to learn even though I’d heard it many times before.

  When the minutes were up, the professor and his assistant started digging. The hole was deep when they were done—nearly six feet, measured exactly with a string. By then they were using trowels, and finally heavy brushes, the kind with wooden backs that scrubbed the floors of the nineteenth century.

  At last they had it, pried loose from the ground. A perfect cast of the ant burrow, with many branches, and a little ball at the bottom where the queen lay encased. It was a strangely beautiful object, a shining metal root, hot enough to be handled only with gloves. It looked like silver.

  Back in his laboratory, many dozens of similar casts hung from the ceiling, with name tags affixed. It was, the professor said, the largest collection of ant burrow casts in the world. One could tell the species of ant from the shape of the burrow—the number of branches, the location of the queen’s chamber. All the millions, working in the dark, and yet they were following a secret plan, a blueprint, which they carried in their genes and reproduced over and over again. Sometimes the burrows were abandoned, for mysterious reasons, and reoccupied, but only by colonies of the same species. The shape of the burrow, the professor said, was identical no matter where they were on earth, and had not changed for tens of thousands of years.

  There was a movement in the doorway.

  “Doctor?” Captain Rai said inquisitively, hood up, peering in the tent.

  “Let them do this,” he said.

  “I don’t mind,” I replied.

  “Already you have done too much,” he said.

  “It’s good to get some exercise. I’m tired of sitting still.”

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled. “It is also good to rest and have lunch.”

  Already it was a little past noon by Rai’s watch. On the way back to the dining tent we passed a few of the villagers—they had broken into small groups for the job—and Rai stopped to speak to them. They emerged from the flurries, dark forms becoming whole, like a pack of wolves. Then they bowed their heads and were gone.

  “What did you say to them?” I asked.

  “I told them to go back to the village today. The snow is not so heavy now.”

  It was true—the snow was lessening.

  “What did the radio say?”

  “The front is passing,” he said. “But they will not be coming now for some time. It will be very deep up high.”

  “How long will it take to melt?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. I stared at him.

  “Sanjit,” I said. “Have I come all this way for nothing?”

  He shrugged, and didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  So we were back in the dining tent again. Rai stamped in behind me, brushing the snow from his clothes in the entrance, and then he turned and shouted over his shoulder for what I assumed was Ali and lunch. The air was close and thick.

  Elise sat comfortably by the heater, hat off, flushed, her hair, damp from the snow, sticking up at odd angles. She looked entirely cheerful, and smiled as we came in.

  We took off our coats, and sat down, but Ali did not appear. Rai glanced at his watch again, then he stood abruptly, apologized, and went out into the snow.

  “Have you seen Ali?” I asked

  “At breakfast,” she said. “While you were sleeping.”

  After a while we heard voices—Rai’s, in anger, and then Ali’s, lower and cajoling. A few minutes passed, then Rai returned to the dining tent in disgust.

  “He was sleeping in his blanket,” he said. “He said he was cold. Our lunch is late.”

  “Do they have a heater in their tent?” I asked.

  “They have the stove. It warms the tent when they cook.”

  “But no heater?”

  He inclined his head.

  “It is okay,” he said.

  Ali entered the tent a few minutes later. He looked entirely wretched in his green cotton jacket and his tracksuit, bowing his head and murmuring his apologies. He was visibly shivering, and I realized that his clothes were wet. He looked chilled to the bone, miserable, and even as he apologized I could see him inching closer to the heater and the great mass of warmth it gave off.

  “He’s soaked,” I said to Rai, who sighed in response and shook his head.

  “It is always a problem with them,” he said. “They are no good in the cold.”

  “Well,” I said, “he needs to warm up. Let him sit by the heater.”

  Captain Rai said something curt to Ali, who bowed some more. Then he spoke, looking down at his feet.

  “What is he saying?” Elise asked.

  “Part of their tent collapsed because they did not clean it off,” Rai said. “They got wet setting it up again. That is why our lunch is late.”

  “Where is the boy?” Elise asked.

  “He is in the cook tent,” Rai said. “He is wet also.”

  “Then he must come and get warm as well,” Elise said, sitting up in her chair. “Tell him.”

  Rai shot a glance at me, then spoke. Ali bowed and bowed again, his voice rising in thanks, until Rai cut him off with a wave of the hand. Ali left immediately, returning a few minutes later with his nephew, who if anything looked even wetter and more miserable than Ali himself. He wore a thin cotton blanket over his tracksuit jacket, stiff imitation blue jeans, and plastic sneakers. I’d hardly noticed him in the weeks we’d spent together—he was perhaps sixteen, with the barest beginnings of a mustache, and a tangle of black hair that obscured his face. He was shivering violently.

  Elise stood up then and gestured to her chair by the heater. Ali refused, however, and instead he and his nephew crouched beside it, rubbing their hands together. They got as close to the heater as they could, their faces turned away from us, and after a while the tent began to smell. Soon the odor was overpowering, and both Elise and I moved away and sat at the edge of the dining table. Steam began to rise off Ali and his nephew as they dried.

  Elise wrinkled her nose.

  “They smell bad,” she said. “Really bad, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Rai said nothing, but he looked intensely mortified, as if the presence of the stinking cook and his nephew reflected on him personally. And I suppose it did—they were his countrymen, after all, and he could speak to them, and he alone among us understood them.

  Rai spoke, sharply again, and both Ali and his nephew flinched and stood.

  “They are warm now,” Rai said.

  “Ask them if they have any dry clothes,” Elise said.

  Rai did so, and Ali and his nephew shook their heads.

  “That is all they have,” Rai said.

  “Do we have anything?” I asked. “Blankets or clothes in the supplies?”

  “I will issue them
some blankets,” he said, and shook his head. “They are useless like this.”

  He stood and left the tent. Ali and his nephew took the opportunity to instantly crouch down by the heater again.

  “I have a jacket also,” Elise said, “maybe it will fit the boy.”

  I did not have an extra jacket, but I had a sweater, and a soft fleece shirt that I was reluctant to part with. But I parted with it nonetheless, and the depth of their gratitude was painful to see, so raw that it generated guilt rather than pleasure. But not for Captain Rai; when he made a show over handing the blanket to Ali it was with a look that said understand why you are receiving this. I watched it carefully; I saw it for what it was. And in that moment I had no doubt that had we been absent, Ali and his nephew would have remained soaked and miserable all night, until the sun finally burned through the mist and warmed them up again.

  That evening, before bed, I wandered over to where the pallets of supplies lay cloaked in snow beneath the tarps. I looked at them carefully, and finally did some calculations in my head, and for the first time realized that we had nothing close to what we needed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next morning the storm was over, and it was all blinding light again, and soon the avalanches were thundering gloriously down the walls across the river.

  “It was kind of Sanjit to give Ali the blanket,” Elise said. Already the villagers were at work, kicking places in the snow for the remaining tents.

  I didn’t answer at first. My stomach rumbled. I’d made several trips out into the rocks already.

  “You do not think so?”

  I turned to her.

  “Yes,” I said, after a moment. “It was kind of him.”

  She looked at me in puzzlement. We were walking out to check the tents. The sky was blue and hard and clear. The drifts we walked through were so soft and light that they barely resisted our passage, and our tracks fell in on themselves almost immediately. A minute or two of wind and there would have been no sign of us at all. It was quiet, full of the stillness that covers every wilderness after a snowfall.