by Frank Huyler
We dug our sleeping bags out of our packs, and crawled into them fully dressed, but we were hungry, worn out from the walk, and the cold seeped out of the rocks and dirt of the path directly into us. We drank the last of our water quickly. It was impossible to get comfortable. My mouth was dry enough to burn. Elise leaned against me, though, and we talked in low tones from time to time. I put my arm around her once, for a little while, until my arm grew cold in the open air and I pulled it back into my sleeping bag. Even that gave me no solace. The hours passed with extraordinary slowness. I knew that I was not directly responsible. It was the dark, and physical exhaustion, and the boulder, the slope just steep enough—it had lined up so perfectly against him. Had he not been carrying a load, I couldn’t see how it would have happened. Had he not been so tired, it wouldn’t have happened. Had Rai simply known where he was, and stopped us earlier, it wouldn’t have happened. And so on. But there was something else as well, and as I sat there on the trail I could not shake it. It seemed as if those dead men on the wall, the soldiers Rai had killed, had somehow struck back at us. I knew it was nonsense, that it was only a trick of my own mind, searching for patterns again, but it was there all the same. I had thought we were safe, I thought we were nearly there, and, as in so many things, I was wrong.
Rai was mostly quiet beside us, but several times I heard him cursing under his breath. We just sat and shivered, waiting for first light, listening to the river.
At first the lightening in the eastern sky was so faint I thought I was deceiving myself. We were too deep in the canyon, the walls too narrow and high above us, for any kind of sunrise. Instead, it was a gradual return to twilight, without warmth. We began to see one another—dust on our faces, and our tangled, matted hair, as we stood up shivering in our damp clothes.
Despite the cold I was as thirsty as I’ve ever been, but as the light revealed the trail and the slope down to the thundering river, I realized that even in daylight there was no safe way of getting close enough to drink.
Rai stood, stretching, stamping his feet, his face dark and angry.
“He was carrying the stove,” he said. That was all. He felt something for Ali, that was clear, but in equal measure he was angry at himself, and the generalized misfortune that had fallen on us, full of the knowledge that he had not done well. Ali, in a sense, had been under his command, one of his soldiers, and he had not been equal to the task. So he was curt, quick in his movements, roughly stuffing his sleeping bag into his pack after lacing up his boots with quick, hard jerks, like tearing paper to pieces.
“We must start walking,” he said, then switched to his own language and addressed the boy, who alone among us had made no move to rise.
The boy did not reply, but the soldier, again with unexpected tenderness, helped him with the blanket, and his pack, urging him, as one might a child, and after a while he stood up. I looked at Elise—her hair pressed against her forehead, her dirty face—but she did not meet my eye, expressionless, as if she’d exhausted whatever sentiments had washed over us all during the long night. I only wanted to get on with it, to get out of the narrows into the sun again.
We set off, shivering. But Rai, just ahead, was keeping a careful eye on the river, and so our pace was slow—he was, I realized, looking for Ali’s body. The river, boiling and hissing below us, seemed increasingly monstrous. But we saw nothing anyway, and from the speed of the current, I knew that he probably had been carried for miles, and that we might never find him at all.
After a while, the walking loosened us, but it only made our thirst worse. My mouth felt full of nettles, my tongue tingled and throbbed, and I could feel the cold, dry air passing through my lips with each breath. The trail coiled up and down, and the canyon, if anything, grew narrower. Finally, after an hour or so, Rai stopped again, fumbling with his map, unfolding it on a knee and studying it.
“We should be almost out,” he said, touching a finger to a point on the map. “Only one or two kilometers more, I think.”
Elise joined us also, and offered a weary smile.
“Are you doing all right?” I asked.
She shrugged, her lips cracked and covered with gray paste.
I was as dry as I’ve ever been, yet the river below us seemed somehow detached from thirst, no different than the gray granite walls, or the gravel beneath our feet. It was a torrent, a crash of white—it almost didn’t look like water at all.
So we continued on, one endless foot in front of the other, but Rai, finally, was correct. Less than an hour later, as we rounded a bend, the canyon abruptly opened once again into a valley, and the river slowed down and spread out into a gray sheet. And then, as we descended down the last steep and rocky slope, we crossed into the sunlight again. It felt blessedly warm as it fell on us. The banks were wide, and the river was nearly quiet, though the sound of whitewater in the canyon behind us was loud in the air. The river ran straight off into the distance as far as I could see. Though we were much lower, the hillsides were as dry and as featureless as before.
There was no sign of Ali. By then, he would have passed slowly, bobbing, rolling, bloody from the rocks above, staining the water around him like a bag of tea. By then, it was clear he wasn’t alive, that he had not found himself gasping and coughing on the bank, delivered by a providential hand. I’d held out that dim hope despite myself. But then I stopped thinking about Ali—all I wanted was a drink of water. When we were close enough, all of us dropped our packs and trotted to the river’s edge.
In the past, I’d always carefully treated my water before drinking. I’d drop in a little black pellet of iodine, and wait as it slowly dissolved in red and orange strings. I’d shake the bottle carefully, and wait some more—the instructions said an hour, if possible. But then I just plunged my bottle into the water, and drank again and again. The water was cold, and settled in my stomach like a stone. My teeth sang. But I drank, as did all of us—the boy and the soldier sucked it greedily out of their cupped hands. It was delicious, it was an indescribable relief, and it was scalding and painful at the same time. I squatted at the water’s edge, my knees aching, and after I could drink no more I cupped my hands as well and washed my face as best I could. I could feel the grease in my hair, and my rough unshaven cheeks across my dirty hands, which were nearly numb from the water. I did it several times, but the water was too cold, and I hardly felt cleaner when I retreated to where our packs lay on the dusty ground and sat down against them in the sun.
I’d drunk too much, too quickly, and a sudden wave of chills and nausea passed through me. For an instant I thought I was going to vomit on the ground, but it eased after a few moments. I ran my wet fingers through my hair to untangle it, but after a while gave up, and simply sat there, shaking violently, looking absently at the rocks at my feet.
“We will stop here,” Rai said. “We will rest today.”
As he spoke, and my nausea settled, and as I leaned back against my pack on the gravel, trying to warm up, I realized how tired I was. I think the others felt the same; in any case, we simply murmured our agreement, and I managed to rouse myself enough to drag my sleeping pad from my pack, and unroll it on the ground, and lie down, with my jacket zipped tight and my sleeping bag over me and my hat pulled down on my face. I didn’t want to talk to anyone just then. I was shivering, and I wanted only to close my eyes and get warm as quickly as possible. Only Rai was up and working, strong enough to be restless, compulsively going through the packs, sorting out our provisions—the rest of us simply lay down as soon as we could. We didn’t speak. All I thought about, as I slowly warmed up again, with my eyes closed beneath my hat, was the sun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Early that afternoon, after we’d dozed fitfully for a few hours, the prospect of staying there for the night became intolerable. I wanted to get down, I wanted to get out of there, and I wasn’t alone. Without even discussing it, we started packing up. Rai had emptied the packs onto the ground, and hesitated over th
e heavy jugs of kerosene. Ali, after all, had the stove.
“We might use it,” I said to Rai. He nodded, and stuffed the jugs back into the duffel.
The boy, for his part, had finally gone silent. He did not meet our eyes, but he’d wolfed down the meat, and drank, and washed himself like the rest. We busied ourselves with details, checking the ground, tying our drawstrings tight, filling our water bottles again, and blowing on our cold hands afterward.
And a few hours later, at the mouth of another canyon, in the shallows spreading out from the main channel, we found him. He lay half submerged, facedown on a gravel bar a few yards out from the bank. He was still strapped to the duffel. His head was underwater, as were his arms and legs—only his back, and part of the green duffel, could be seen. The smooth gray rocks on the bar were the size of eggs and melons.
Beyond him, the channel deepened and showed its speed, a widow’s peak of water running down the center, just starting to break.
Elise saw him first, and called out, pointing. Rai, though first in line, had missed him, and so had I, though he was out in the open, and fully visible. We all stopped when we realized what she was pointing at, then took off our packs and lowered them to the ground.
Rai shook his head, once, and suddenly he seemed very young to me, unprepared for what lay before us. General Said, I was sure, would not have batted an eye, but Rai was visibly shaken.
Ali would have to be pulled off the bar and through the shallows to the bank. Rai said a few words to the soldier. Both sat down and unlaced their boots, then rolled up their pants, their feet curiously pale and alike. The boy sat on the ground, rocking back and forth as he watched.
They pranced out awkwardly, slow and unsteady in the current, wincing at the cold and waving their arms for balance. The water came to their knees, rippling around their legs, and it might have been amusing had Ali not been lying dead a few feet away. They reached the bar, and stepped up on it beside him. The water rose above their ankles. It was clearly painful—each lifted one foot, then the other, up into the air, rapidly, as if standing on hot sand.
But still they hesitated for a moment before touching him. Finally, they grabbed the body by the shoulders, and tried to heave him off. But he was heavy, soaked through, pinned against the gravel bar by the current, and they only succeeded in lifting his back and part of his head—I caught a glimpse of black hair—above the surface. For a few moments they struggled with him, but then Rai straightened and said something to the soldier, though his voice was drowned out by the flowing water.
They crouched down, fumbling with the duffel bag and the straps, until the soldier pulled it free and lifted it, with a dripping curtain of water, wholly out of the river. Rai helped him, holding it to his chest, soaking himself, and the man turned and forced his arms through the straps. Then they both turned, and rushed back across the channel as quickly as they could. The pain was clear on their faces, and when they reached the bank, and the duffel bag fell on the ground with a wet, heavy cough, both of their feet were bloody and nearly white. They sat down in silence, and began rubbing them, first with their bare hands, then with a towel that Elise had quickly retrieved from her pack and handed them, rocking back and forth as their feet warmed.
Without the pack to weigh him down, Ali rode a little higher in the water—I could see his arms, waving and loose, and every so often his head would nod up out of the current for an instant before disappearing again.
Rai and the soldier exchanged a few words, and then, after a few minutes, they put their boots back on. Rai’s chest was dark and wet from the duffel bag, and his face was thunderous.
“I never should have brought him,” he said. “I knew this. I should not have listened to her.”
“Listened to whom?” I replied, puzzled.
He blew on his hands, then glanced at me.
“My wife,” he said, reluctantly, as if regretting his words.
“Your wife? How did she know Ali?”
“He was her cousin,” Rai said, finally.
I didn’t expect that at all. I never would have guessed that Ali was related by marriage to Rai. It completely surprised me.
“I’m sorry,” I managed, after a moment.
He didn’t answer, only nodded to the soldier, and then they both waded off again into the water with their boots on.
They struggled and cursed. Ali was a wet mattress, loose and slippery, and finally they simply grabbed fistfuls of cloth and dragged him without ceremony by the back through the shallows between them, stumbling on the uneven bottom. His head hung down, and left a wake. His legs flowed behind him. He seemed far heavier than he had been in life.
They paused at the edge of the bank, and then, grunting with effort, heaved his torso up and out of the water and onto the rocks. Then they stepped up beside him, reached down, and hauled him entirely onto the bank. Specks of gravel clung to his clothes, to his legs and back, to the matted, black mass of his hair—the river hadn’t washed him clean. Instead, it had filled him with silt.
They left him there for a moment, catching their breath, but finally Rai bent down, and rolled him over by the shoulders as delicately as he could. His head followed, loosely, and for the first time I saw his face.
There he was—Ali, eyes cloudy, half open, expressionless. His slack jaw, his naked teeth, yellow and brown, above his patchy black beard, shot through with gray—a few scrapes, a bruise here or there, but otherwise his face was undamaged. I could read nothing there. No regret, no fear. It’s always like that.
I was standing above him. But then I knelt down, and looked more carefully. The whites of his eyes were red, his pupils dark and empty. The gravel had left a fine tracery, like a watermark, on his cheek. His soaked clothes clung to the exact outline of his body—his thighs, the point of his hips.
I reached out and touched his neck, feeling for a pulse. It was more a reflex than anything, a kind of automatic act, the sort of thing one does at such moments.
His neck was very cold and firm, like a bag of flour left in a freezer. My finger left a dimple in the dead muscle, and I wiped my hand on my leg after I touched him. Then I stood.
Elise watched, her hand clenched into a fist, which she held gently to her mouth. None of us said anything at first.
Then the boy started up. It was as if he’d been waiting, gathering himself for the effort. He ran to the body, and fell on his knees beside it, and began wailing. He bent to kiss his uncle’s face, and stroked his beard. He tugged at the sodden clothes, and shouted up into the air while everyone else was quiet.
I couldn’t watch it. I turned my back, and walked away alongside the river. There was no dignity there. He was only a boy, of course. But Ali was not his father, nor his brother; he was only an uncle, and I suspected that they didn’t even live together in the city. I knew my thoughts were far too hard. The shock it gave us, the calamity that had now so visibly descended on him, on his wife and his nameless numbers of children—I didn’t care about any of it right then. But if I’d come for a reduction to the essentials, I thought, surely I had found it.
Rai called out to me, and I turned and let him approach. He paused before me, then lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hands, inhaling deeply, before he said anything. For a long moment he looked entirely lost, bereft and shaken.
“I am not sure what to do,” he said, and I realized that he was asking me for advice.
“What do you mean?”
“I would like to carry him down,” he said. “So that his family can have him. This is important to us.”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
He looked out over the river.
“I don’t know,” he said.
I thought about it. We had days of walking left. Even in the cold, the body would start to decay. I imagined the soldier, and Rai, and perhaps even myself and the boy, our packs discarded, struggling with him across the rough trail, as he began to stink and blacken and drip. It was not something I could face
.
“We would have to leave a lot behind,” I said.
He nodded. I wondered what Rai would have done had he not been related, however distantly, to the figure on the bank, and how much this fact revealed about him—his past, his poverty and struggle, his desire to be something other than what he was, in a world where the lines of class were never crossed. And there he was, in his army sweater, with that pistol on his hip, trying to cross them anyway.
“I think we should bury him here.”
“It will be difficult to bury him,” Rai said. “We have nothing to dig a grave. It is all stones.”
“Then we’ll have to cover him with rocks. We can put him at the base of the cliff.”
Rai was uneasy, shifting from foot to foot, not meeting my eye.
“It is not a proper burial,” he said. “There will be animals.”
“I don’t know what else we can do. We could cremate him, I suppose. We could use the kerosene.”
Rai shook his head.
“That is forbidden,” he said. “We do not do this.”
“Why is this so important to you?” I asked him, carefully. “Is it because he was your wife’s cousin? Or because you’re blaming yourself?”
Rai ran his hand through his hair.
“He was clumsy,” he said. “He was not paying attention. He is a foolish man. He was not carrying so much. It is God who decides this. But I should have known this anyway. I should have been more careful with him. So I am blaming myself, Doctor. I am blaming myself for everything. I told my wife I would help him and I did not.”
He looked out at the river, then shook his head, and threw his cigarette down on the ground.
“We can’t carry him down,” I said. “We don’t even have a stretcher. His body will decompose. So we either bury him or cremate him. Wouldn’t your family understand that?”
“This is a very bad thing for them,” he replied. “He supports them. His wife, his children. Now there is nothing for them.”