by Adam Popescu
“There are many things you can do at university, many things to study. But you’ll have to spend a lot more time in school first. Right here.”
“I will. Is it difficult? The schooling, I mean. Were there other Sherpas with you in Kathmandu? Did you miss home?”
I snuck a glance at Norbu. Silent, but with a thin little curl to his lips.
“It takes a few years, and there are exams to pass. But if you study every day, you can do it. And there were Sherpas in the university, Nima. Even Sherpa women.”
I smiled, my first and only smile that black day. Norbu looked confused. It’s not his fault, I excused him. He had never heard women speak like this. He grew up with his mother and aunts speaking about matches for their children, and yaks, and grain, and barley. Not about going down the mountain and working in a city he hated. At that moment I made a silent promise which I repeated again and again, until it became a mantra. I will leave this place. I will be free.
3
THE NURSE HAD A LOT OF WORK THAT NIGHT. MOST OF THE VILLAGERS brought the broken bodies of their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, they brought them and stayed despite the fact that the nurse was a woman, they all stayed—where else could they go?—and as we waited for my father to wake, we listened to the moans and screams. Inside and out, the small school was filled with broken and bleeding bodies—there was no more room—bodies lining the school’s entrance, bodies in the corridor, overflowing from the three classrooms, all of them begging for the nurse. No more time to chat.
Norbu and I sat silently by my father’s cot, our bodies close. I could feel the warmth coming off him, smell the sweat and that special scent of the wild, the earth, the mountains. He inched his hand towards mine and all at once took it in his, just as Nurse Lanja turned back to us, her white coat stained dark red, and just as quickly Norbu dropped my hand.
She looked tired. And if she had seen us holding hands a moment earlier, her face wouldn’t say, a hard mask over it now. She stood over my father, pulled his eyelids open, pointed a small light into them. The light startled him enough for him to wake completely, and then he began throwing his arms up wildly, bellowing at the unknown woman, “Who are you? Who are you?”
“I’m your nurse, Lanja Sherpa,” she said calmly, pushing him back onto the bed with those bird-like hands, painted fingers splayed on his chest like feathers. “You’ve had a severe accident, sir. You must rest. This is medicine I’m giving you—”
But he was too strong, too wild. Norbu and I had to hold him down while Nurse Lanja grabbed the needle and stuck it into him again. With all of my weight pressing down on him, I could feel his power. It was horrible to see my father like this, but I couldn’t look away. I felt just like when the ru’ struck. To calm myself, I found myself thinking: Down the mountain, in the city. A very different place for a woman. Very different from here.
Father finally stopped fighting, the medicine taking effect. But when the nurse held up a bottle of pills, he slapped her hand away. The pills rolled onto the floor and I rushed to collect them. “He’ll only listen to a man,” I whispered.
Nurse Lanja nodded, handed the pills to Norbu. “These are antibiotics, to ward off infection. He must take all of them. He needs a proper cast and should come back when I get more supplies.” She pulled out a wooden crutch from a closet. “Birch bark. Very strong, but very light. Tell him to use the crutch until then,” she insisted. “Otherwise, he’ll never heal properly.”
Norbu nodded and took the crutch.
“I have other patients to tend to,” Nurse Lanja said. To my father: “Please be well, sir.” He turned his face away from her. Then to me: “Take care, Nima. I hope I will see you again.”
“Blessings and good luck.”
“Tashi delek,” she responded.
“Tashi delek,” I said back.
We left the infirmary, my father taking the crutch from Norbu, but refusing our help as we stepped past the wounded and injured who crowded the school. I tried not to look—I didn’t want to see people I knew. Nor did I want to imagine how Nurse Lanja would deal with this all by herself.
It was worse to watch my father, already walking so soon after I’d seen bone sticking out of his skin, even with Nurse Lanja’s treatment and the leg in a splint. It was madness. Hobbling on that crutch, mumbling about evil medicine, lepchas, snow demons, he seemed mad. He was mad. We followed behind Father as he limped back home. But there was no home to go back to.
“My parents have opened our home to your family,” Norbu said as we walked through the cold.
When Father stopped in mid-stride I thought he was going to collapse, and I caught up with him and tried to fit my shoulder under his other arm, to help him. He shoved me away so hard I fell face-first into a patch of ice. Norbu helped me up. My cheek was bleeding. Neither of us said a word. Father just kept hobbling, his whole body shaking, his teeth chattering. He didn’t want a woman—any woman, not even his own daughter—to acknowledge his pain. There was still power in him, a pride he wouldn’t give up even if it killed him. He didn’t want a woman’s help.
On that birch crutch, every step, every wince of pain filling his eyes with fire, my father hiked back to Khumjung, with Norbu and I behind him.
The village looked like the mountain had fallen on top of it. People were still running with torches, still digging, still wailing their pain. But we walked past all that, past the digging and crying, to Norbu’s home—one of the lucky few on the ridge untouched by the ru’.
Norbu’s family had taken their animals from the ground floor and retied them in the yard, and every single rug and floor mat they had were laid out for us to sleep. Father fell on one of those rugs, his leg dripping. Norbu’s mother didn’t say anything as Father bled on that rug, she kept her mouth shut and her eyes down as she offered her guest a steaming tea that he took with a swollen red hand. Mother sat by the fire, close enough that it looked like her clothes would go up in flames. Still clutching that shoe to her chest, she stared into the fire. Huddled around her, my sisters looked like they had not stopped crying since we took my father to the school.
Father crept to sit next to Mother. Our family was together again, but without my brother, buried under the ice a few hundred yards away. If you die in great pain, your soul is trapped—a prisoner of it—only a great act of compassion can free you from it. Mother said words like this sometimes. Sayings she had heard from the lamas and nuns. No one said anything now, the only sounds in that small room were of the flames crackling and the sobs from my sisters.
We never were able to dig Ang out. We tried, and kept trying when spring turned to summer. The rocks and ice that the ru’ had rained onto the village had settled so firmly that they were part of the mountain now. We couldn’t free my only brother’s tiny body. The weight of the ice, rock, stone, it was too much to clear, even with Norbu and the rest of the village helping.
There was no puja ceremony, no sky funeral, nothing to offer to the sky, nothing to give—not the wooden yak toy Ang loved, nor his favorite red cap my mother had sewn him. There was nothing to bury beyond that shoe, nothing else of my brother remained. So my mother kept the last thing she had left.
We left Khumjung without observing the customary forty-nine days of bardo, the period of judgment in which a soul is suspended between worlds. We had to leave the village and Norbu’s home. We moved to Khunde, farther from the school, farther up the mountain, even more removed from the world I wanted to join. And we started again, with nothing. All but three of our yaks had died in the ru’. Our possessions were the clothes that we wore, and all the savings we had was the money Father had been paid on his last trek, brought home buried in his boot, as usual.
His last trek.
Armed with hammers, Norbu and other neighbors helped us build our new home, gathering wood and stone, shuttling from Khumjung each morning and shuttling back at night. We stayed in their homes a few nights at a time. And in Norbu’s home more often tha
n all the others. My father would never have accepted such charity, but that was before he’d lost so much, and there was less and less of him every day. He should have been resting, regaining his strength. But he couldn’t sit still. His leg never mended right. Neither did his mind.
He used the pills that Nurse Lanja gave him. I saw him take them. The pain must have been horrible—what else would have made him take the “bad medicine”—but it didn’t matter. He was always on that leg. Trying to lift stones, hammering side by side with Norbu and the other men. His pride the only part of him still strong—he kept fighting and working, and every day he got weaker.
At nights, after a meal of tsampa, balls of roast barley flour, and dal bhat—full of rice, vegetable curry, lentils, the meal all mountain people eat daily—we would sleep in the communal living room, sharing the fire with goats and chickens while our hosts slept upstairs. Every night, a little more of my father melted away as he stared into that fire, the flames swallowing him as he swallowed his nightly bottle of chang, the home brew that had become his cure-all elixir.
“Was the healer’s magic not strong enough?” my sisters asked me.
She wasn’t a healer, I had told them. She was a nurse. A modern woman. But to my sisters, healing is magic. It was to me, too, until I saw Nurse Lanja at work. And they couldn’t understand the things she had told me about her life.
“You said that she was smart,” they would say. “Why isn’t Father healing? When will he get better?”
Perhaps he was no longer strong enough, no longer young enough, to mend? But we never said that in words, for what we speak may come true. Even words have spirits inside them, and lives. Other questions bubbled from my sisters’ lips: “Why is Norbu helping us, Eldest? You think he has one of us in mind? Why else would he help?”
“Because he’s a good man,” I said. “That’s why.”
But Second laughed in my face: “He wants to marry one of us, Eldest, and who could it be but you?”
My sisters were right about at least one thing. Norbu didn’t have to be there, and we never asked for his help, yet here he was every day, hauling heavy stones for someone else’s new home instead of earning money on the trail. I began thinking of Norbu differently. He’d rushed over with his shovel to help us try to find Ang, and then he had helped father hobble to the school and back, not just from his good heart alone. He was a good man, yes. And good men need wives.
One day, towards the end of our new home’s construction, my sisters were herding our three yaks in the hills, my mother was tending to my father, and we were alone for a few moments, Norbu and I. I had been helping mix the mud and clay to set the stones. We didn’t speak much, we never did. We shared cold water from a halved plastic bottle, the mikaru trash we found everywhere and saved to reuse.
“Why are you helping us?” I asked him suddenly.
Cheeks reddening, eyes darting at me, then away, the face behind the mask showed through for a moment. Then Norbu took a long drink, and when he put the bottle down, the mask was back on. “Why am I helping? We’re all helping, Nima. Everyone is helping, it’s our way. Would you not help if my family was in need?”
He was right, but that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Though I wasn’t sure whether I liked him in that way, I wanted to know how much he liked me. But I couldn’t ask him that.
Crushed by the loss—my brother, my father, everything—I sobbed softly. “Why did this happen to us?” Like a little girl again, craving the comfort of kind words.
Norbu scratched his forehead. When he answered, it was with his mind, not his heart.
“Once, explorers came to the Khumbu. Heroes with white eyes and white faces. And when they came, we would help them. We were heroes, too. We would guide the mikarus, protect them, share in the glory together. Now heroes don’t come anymore. Anyone with money can come. And they don’t care what they leave behind. Too many of us don’t care either. Too many just want the mikaru money. One season on the mountain is worth how many in the fields?”
“Many,” I agreed, disappointed by his answer.
“Many,” he repeated. “We’ve forgotten the mountain’s power. That’s why Khumbi Yulha and Jomo Miyo Lang Sangma took revenge that day.”
Khumbi Yulha, the deity of Khumbu, and Jomo Miyo Lang Sangma, the goddess of Jomolangma, the world’s tallest mountain.
He was right of course. Even though people didn’t like to talk about it, things weren’t as they used to be. And I didn’t really desire Norbu—I don’t think I did—but I was so confused, so in need, all I wanted was for Norbu to clear things up for me. I needed someone close to my own age, someone outside of the family. But Norbu drained the last of the water, then got up and back to work. Always working.
“Work is good for the spirit and body,” my Father used to say. “It lifts the spirit, it hardens the body.”
Whatever seeds could have been planted right then between Norbu and I never took root. We built the new home in a fortnight. My family was so relieved to have somewhere of our own to sleep after weeks under the roofs of others. I thought Norbu looked sad when we left his family’s home that last night, but he didn’t say anything to me.
Our new home wasn’t much when it was finished. One story, very small, and everything donated by our neighbors: beds, blankets, a blackened stove. They even made us a gift of a goat and two pigs, just enough to start a new life. And we still had three yaks, roaming in the hills.
Most Sherpa homes are two stories, the first for the animals, the second for the family. Ours was too small even for a modest altar. My father always said this home would be temporary. “Next season, I will be back on the trail and we’ll build a real home. Maybe back in Khumjung.”
I wanted to believe what he said. But it became harder and harder for him to move. Now, almost four years later, we still live in the same house. Father can still barely walk. And we still live on the same floor as our animals. The musky smell of the beasts clinging to my clothes no matter how thoroughly I wash them, my hands white and wrinkled from washing, and yet, forever I feel dirty. At our old home, the altar was a place where I could find peace—not in prayer but in having a moment alone with myself. Here in Khunde, we don’t even have a place to give a simple offering!
It was a year after we left Khumjung that Father took me out of school officially. I had too many chores to have time to sit in class, but I had gone back to visit Nurse Lanja, a few minutes at a time, and we spoke of the outside world. I wanted to ask her to paint my fingernails like hers, but I was frightened of what Father would say. To even visit, I had to make elaborate plans and work twice as fast. My father may have been mad and lame in one leg, but he always had a sharp eye. And he noticed. I would finish my chores quickly, too quickly for my father’s liking. “Where are you going?” he would ask, hobbling after me. And when I told him once foolishly that I was still so thankful to Nurse Lanja, the one who had saved him that day, the swift smack of his hand across my face told me how he remembered my secret friend.
Father forbade me to set foot in the school again, and Mother told me that whatever dreams I had, I must help the family first, and that meant either work or marriage. What point was there to dream of books and of places I would never go? A woman should be like water, able to flow around anything. My mother had often said that phrase when I was young. My mother, the stay-at-home abbot, always speaking the words from the dharma and never practicing them.
I had just turned fifteen. I alone out of my sisters could read, and only like a child. I wished that I had had more time to study, but there was none. I had to work because my father could not. I had to help feed my sisters. Father was no use for that. That’s when he started to live with a bottle in his hand. He raved drunkenly every day, blaming our misfortune on the lepchas or the wicked gods on Mount Kailash. A man punished with six daughters—why would he give the gods his reverence?
Punished for having six girls. Girl after girl. Punished for breaking his leg. Never to
work again. So he punished us all, too, for sharing his fate. He cursed the monasteries, the monks, the gods, he condemned them all.
Did that make the gods angry? Did it stir their wrath against us?
My mother slowly turned away from the faith also. She still chanted, still repeated the words of the lamas and monks, and it was hard for her not having an altar. Sometimes she traveled to her older sister’s home, to make an offering for Ang, to help free his soul from our failure to mourn him properly.
I would pray for my brother in my own way. I would go back to Khumjung in the spring, on the anniversary of his death. A day of deep sadness which I marked with a white khata scarf that I left by the tip of the old juniper tree, the rest of it still buried underneath ice and rock, too much to ever dig out.
My brother’s soul was trapped forever, and I felt responsible as the Eldest. When I went by myself to the old home, I kept my hood over my face so the villagers wouldn’t recognize me. I didn’t want to talk to them, I didn’t want them to see my pain. My family may have already been cracked before we left Khumjung, but the ru’ sent us flying in the wind. And we’re still flying.
The one thing we kept from those days, found by one of the villagers, was a framed photo of my father, its glass shattered, but the picture inside it intact. It had been blown out of our home somehow and landed on the other side of the village. In that photo my father is a young man with a wide smile and ice chips in his scraggly beard. A proud climbing Sherpa, strong enough to take on Jomolangma, arm in arm with a Westerner.
My father was so happy back then. The photo hangs crooked in our new home, in the same broken frame, taped together. Father never looks at that picture. He believes more and more that the gods are against him. He’s made me believe that, too. Many nights, squeezing my eyes tight, I try to pray. I should know better. The gods don’t listen to me, I’m my father’s daughter.
4