Right of Thirst

by Frank Huyler

  He picked up another handful of gravel, and threw it into the river, and suddenly I could see how much he wanted my forgiveness.

  A moment passed.

  “How did your father die?”

  “He was struck by a lorry in the street,” Rai said. I’d expected something else, an illness, perhaps, a poor man’s tragedy, untouched by the modern world.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Your mother raised you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Our relatives helped us. My uncles and cousins. They made it possible for me to go to school. But they are nothing also. They had little to give us.”

  “I’m sure your father wasn’t nothing. I’m sure he was a good man who did the best he could.”

  “He was a good man. It did not help him at all. Or us.”

  “You made a terrible choice,” I said finally, because it cost me nothing. “I think it was wrong. But I understand why you did it. When I was your age I might have done the same in your place. That’s the truth.”

  As I spoke, I thought how easy it was to absolve him, and how easy it was to absolve all the others, caught up in their fates, following orders, doing whatever was asked of them, no matter how dark, or hard, or merciless.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Rai said, after a while, staring at the current. “Thank you for listening to this. It is difficult.”

  “So,” I said. “Were you what you hoped?”

  He laughed, briefly and mirthlessly.

  “No, Doctor,” he said. “I was not. Not at all.”

  He stood there for a while longer, as if he did not want to bring the conversation to an end.

  “Maybe that’s not a bad thing,” I said.

  “I must see to the others,” he replied, finally. “Please, it is important to eat even if you are not hungry. We have much walking tomorrow also. And I am sorry I was angry with you today.”

  With that, he reached out, and touched my shoulder, and then he turned and walked back toward the stove, and the lantern, where Elise sat alone.

  I watched the current a while longer, until it became difficult to make out, and the stars began emerging in the darkness of the sky overhead. It was strange, I thought, listening to the river, how this place had exposed him, just as it had exposed me. It felt like a blank screen upon which my entire life had somehow been projected. All that depth and absence, all that high empty country, and the waiting of the past weeks, giving way to something else entirely, something I never expected to be part of—I could hardly comprehend it. I had expected to lose myself in work, in a foreign land, freed from the burden of the familiar. Instead I felt as if I was gazing into a clear pool, bottomless, searching for signs in the depths, and all I found was the ghost of my own face, and the faces of all the others, in imperfect reflections.

  I stood, stiffly, and made my way down to where Elise and Rai sat in strained silence, waiting for dinner. The small candle in the lantern lit up their faces. Ali and his nephew crouched a few feet off, and occasionally a bit of kerosene smoke made its way into the circle. Rai called out to Ali, softly, and then made room for me to sit beside him.

  “It is chapati and dahl only tonight,” Rai said. “I am sorry.”

  Ali had always prepared what he imagined was Western food for Elise and me. Cans of corned beef and cans of peeled white potatoes, or rice. Omelets for breakfast, stale moldy bread warmed on the stove. I knew there was a courteous intention there, and so I’d never requested anything else—I just ate what I was given, as did Elise, and Rai. For Rai, I think our monotonous diet was an opportunity to be, however subtly, one of us, as opposed to one of them. Ali and his nephew, however, ate chapati and dahl every day. They’d cooked the chapati—unleavened bread—on flat stones, which they heated on the kerosene stove and had chosen with care. I knew this only because I’d seen them scouring the rocky ground together when we first arrived, and I’d asked Rai what they were doing.

  But now, because they were exhausted, they were serving us their own food.

  As I sat beside Rai, I heard a slapping noise coming from the direction of the kerosene stove. I turned, peering through the darkness, and I realized that it was Ali, flattening dough against hot stones. After a while I began to smell it—the smell of baking bread. It smelled unexpectedly wonderful, and I watched him, plucking the bread off the hot rock, slapping another ball of dough flat between his dirty hands, then dropping it on the stone again, where it sizzled, hot enough to kill whatever lived on his fingers.

  A few moments later, they brought it to us—dahl, and bread. The bread was cooked perfectly, crusty on the outside, soft and latticed in the middle, like a thick tortilla, made from rough white flour, and we dipped it in the stew, full of strange spices, peppers, thick and filling, leaving a pleasant tingle on the lips, which I washed away with cold gulps of iodinated river water. It was easily the best meal I’d had since arriving. It was the kind of food made for cold weather—dense and heavy. The food of the poor, but all the more sustaining for it.

  The three of us ate our fill without talking, and the others did the same a few feet away.

  “Why don’t they come and join us,” I said to Rai. “They shouldn’t be over there in the dark.”

  Rai called out to them.

  They were surprised—I could sense it in the long pause that followed Rai’s invitation. But then they accepted—they could hardly refuse—and came out of the dark. Ali bobbed and smiled, uneasy, and his nephew looked only at his feet, although a few minutes later I caught him sneaking glances at both Elise and me. They settled on their haunches a safe distance from us, but within the circle of light cast by the lantern. We ate in silence—Elise and Rai and me with our spoons, our paper napkins, and Ali and his nephew with their fingers.

  Rai reached down to the bottle at his feet, poured the rum into his tea, and took a long swallow.

  “Don’t leave me out,” I said, extending my cup.

  Rai passed me the bottle. It was only three-quarters full.

  “Do you want some?” I asked Elise.

  “Oh,” she said, as if she had been somewhere else. But then she extended her mug. “Yes. Please.”

  The rest of them looked at us, uncertain.

  “Do they drink?” I asked. “Can they have some?”

  Rai said something in his own tongue.

  I turned, and offered the bottle to them. At first, I thought they might refuse, or be offended, but instead Ali leapt to his feet, darted off into the dark, and returned within seconds with two battered cups—one for the soldier, and one for himself. Only the boy went without. I poured several inches into each cup, and we each began to sip at the rum, and finally we were all together, with thousands of empty square miles around us, gathered beside a single lantern. It was a moonless night, and the millions of stars overhead astonished me again, as they always did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Can I stay with you again?” Elise asked, later, as we walked to our tents after dinner.

  “Of course.”

  She hesitated, and began to cry a little.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, composing herself. “All I want now is to go home.”

  She retrieved her sleeping bag, and when we reached my tent I unzipped the door, and held it for her as she ducked inside. I waited for a few moments, giving her time to undress and get in her sleeping bag, and then I followed. I undressed as well, inside my bag, and we lay beside each other in the dark, listening to the river.

  “I feel like I am somewhere else,” she said. “I do not understand how he could do this.”

  I found myself thinking of the corpses on the wall, and whether they had been carried down, and how it had been done. I imagined wrists and ankles lashed to poles, pendulous necks and open mouths, blood dripping on the rocks. I imagined them laid side by side on the ground, and photographed, as the soldiers posed smiling above them.

  “He knew what he was doing,” I said. “He just didn’t know what it felt like to do it.” />
  “It does not matter,” she said. “They are dead anyway for nothing.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But his reasons were complex.”

  “Why are you defending him?” she said, accusingly. “He is a murderer, even if they ordered him to do it. I thought he was different, but he is not. All of them are the same. And now there is no camp because of them. No research, nothing.”

  I realized she was wiping her eyes in the dark beside me.

  “And Homa,” she continued. “Everything is terrible for her and that is for nothing also.”

  She was so young, I thought, so certain in her convictions, and so open to them. I envied her full heart, and the depth of her outrage, and wondered why I could not also rise, or rise fully. If I felt raw, raked and open, as I knew I did, it came upon me in secret ways, bubbling out of the deep, and caught me by surprise, and did not fully reveal itself to my conscious mind, like a flicker in the corner of my eye that vanished when I turned to look.

  “I’m not defending him,” I said. “I’m trying to understand him.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

  “What did he say to you when he came up here earlier?”

  “He was asking for my forgiveness.”

  “Why would he ask this from you?”

  “His father died when he was young. He lives in a brutal and corrupt country. He can barely support his family. He looks up to me because he thinks I’m rich and successful, and he killed those men because he’s desperate to distinguish himself. It’s not that complicated.”

  “So you are saying that it is okay what he has done.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Did you forgive him?”

  I thought for a while.

  “Forgiveness isn’t the right word,” I said.

  “Then what is the right word?”

  “Sadness,” I said. “I’m sad for him.”

  “Maybe you are right, that he is not so bad on his own,” she said, a few moments later. “But together they are like monsters. They could do anything.”

  We stopped talking for a while after that, but neither of us could sleep. She shifted fitfully beside me. Long minutes passed. I listened to her breathing, and my own.

  And then, without thinking, I was rolling over on my side to face her, and I was reaching out, and my hand was against her cheek, and then I was stroking her hair.

  She took a breath, and then sat up in her sleeping bag. I froze, my face burning in the darkness. I withdrew my hand, and began to murmur my apologies, because there was no mistaking my intentions. For a terrible moment I thought she was going to turn on her headlamp.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she reached out, and pulled me down with her as she lay back again, and her own breath was quickening, and she was reaching for the zipper on her sleeping bag, drawing it down, and then I kissed her. It stunned me, to kiss her like that, as if I were plunging into a hot bath, and then I felt her arms around me, her hands finding their way beneath my shirt to the flushed bare skin of my back. I began to fumble with her thin fleece sleeping clothes, but she stopped me.

  “Wait,” she said, pushing me off gently, and I sat back as she asked, my heart pounding.

  She undressed, deliberately and carefully, putting her clothes to the side. I listened to her breathing, and my own, and in the darkness of the tent I could just make out the white form of her body on the sleeping bag. I pulled off my shirt, and then she reached out and pulled me down against her, her mouth rising up to mine, the warmth of her body against me, and then it was the bath again, the pool, the breathing, the curves of her hips and her openness, my hands on her body, and then the lift of her pelvis and the deep, breathtaking shock, her upturned face beneath me, the heat of her breath in my ear, my hands tight on her hips, the rocking and the sound of it, and the gasps we both made.

  It was over in only a few moments, but with her sleeping bag below us and mine above, I felt as though the world had changed entirely around me once again. It was dizzying, as we lay in that strange familiarity that men and women have at such times, both foreign and together.

  We lay there, and I was careful not to overwhelm her with tenderness, or with speech. My hand rested on her belly, and during those minutes I felt as though I’d been emptied entirely, that nothing else was there—not the soldiers, not the corpses on the mountainside, none of it. It was just her body beside me, and my hand, and her warmth beneath it. She was wide awake, and I could see her blinking in the near darkness.

  “I am thinking about my life,” she said, after a long while. “About what I want to do. About having children. Many things. I can’t stop. I’m just lying here and doing this.”

  “Do you want to have children?”

  “Of course. When I have finished my degree.”

  She paused, hesitating, and I could feel it all begin to recede.

  “I have a partner,” she said, finally.

  “You’re talking about Scott Coles, aren’t you?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yes,” she said. “But how did you know?”

  “It was an educated guess.”

  “He’s trying very hard to be good,” she said. “He wants to be good. But then he sleeps with other girls. I do not know, but I think so. And he says he will come here to help us, but he does not come. Sometimes I think he likes giving his speeches more than he likes working here.”

  “He told me just the opposite,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “He always says this. He does raise the money. He is very honest with the money. But he likes the audience also.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “I met him a few years ago,” she said. “Before the earthquake. We were at a conference together. It was in Berlin.”

  “And you’ve been in a relationship since then?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I do not see him so often. Always he is traveling, raising money. Always this is so important.”

  “It’s hard to raise money for anything,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “He started the camps. He provides money for them. He wants to do good. It’s true.”

  “What did he do before all of this? He said he was a climber.”

  “He was a climber. He owned a climbing shop in California.”

  She raised herself on her elbow, and turned toward me in the dark.

  “He is not young anymore,” she said. “And his family, they are more successful than him. His brothers and his father. So he is angry with them. Very angry, I think.”

  “Was he married? Does he have children?”

  “He was married. He has a daughter and a son also. I have never met them. They are young. He does not see them often either. They live with their mother.”

  “He told me he almost climbed an eight-thousand-meter peak,” I said. “He told me he decided to do relief work when he saw some climbers killed in front of him. He said that he turned around when the summit was in his reach.”

  She sighed.

  “Yes,” she said, lying down again. “He tells this story. But I am not sure about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She thought for a moment before answering.

  “He did try to climb an eight-thousand-meter peak. It was a big mountain, very dangerous. And there were climbers killed up high in an avalanche. But I think it was someone else who saw them and turned back, not him. And he wants very much to have this memory. So he says it is his.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He is a good climber lower down,” she said. “He is strong. But he has problems with altitude. He gets sick. Some people are this way. Some people who are strong lower down are weak up high.”

  “Have you climbed with him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We climbed Mont Blanc together. Not so high. Only five thousand meters. But he had some trouble anyway.”

  “Altitude sickness is unpredictable,” I said.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “I know,” she said, anxiously. “But last year I met someone who knows Scott also. A climber. It is a small community. I asked him about Scott and the expedition. He said he heard how in the beginning Scott is always saying how strong he was, how fast. How he will be a famous climber. But when they got to the mountain he could do nothing. He only reached camp two and then he had to go down again. He tried this several times, but each time it was the same. The others were laughing at him, so he went home before they finished. That is what he told me. He was not with them, but still I think this is what happened.”

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “You must not tell him if you see him again. I feel bad for Scott about this.”

  I took a deep breath, and said what I knew I shouldn’t.

  “Elise,” I said, “what are you doing with him? Can’t you see that he’s not what he seems?”

  “I think you are a little bit unfair,” she said, sadly. “And I am not so serious about him anymore. But he wants to be better. He wants to believe what he says. It is not all for show.”

  I was silent.

  “I think I have said too much,” she said, uneasily, after a while. “I like him, you know? I cannot help this.”

  She turned then, and leaned forward, and kissed my cheek, and then she sat up, and put her sleeping clothes back on.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “I’m a little bit cold.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The next morning we woke early, just after sunrise, and dressed, and left the tent. We said little. But from the first she didn’t meet my eye, or kiss me again. Instead, she smiled and looked away. I saw it immediately, without a word being spoken.

  We drank our tea, and ate some cold chapati, and then we packed up and started walking down the path by the river in the cold of the morning, as the valley narrowed around us, and the walls around us became closer and steeper.

  As the light began to flood into the canyon I felt my attention turn to the days ahead for the first time. We were safe, and were going home, and the events of the past few days had receded just enough to let me begin to think of other things. I thought about Elise, and her silence, and what it meant. I felt entirely bewildered. The landscape around us felt both endlessly the same and infused with tiny details—a scarlet pinpoint flower among cactus spines, or the hump of glistening river as it rose unbroken over a deep rock. I imagined there were fish, as in the lake—silver streaks, cold and effortless.