by Adam Popescu
The sirdar appears holding a tray with cups of tea. Lasha the sirdar. This time, in the safety of this place, he somehow has the nerve to look at me. Coward. He hands Ethan a cup of tea, then Daniel. Then he comes closer to Val and I, and hands her a cup. In between sips, Ethan rattles off something to Daniel, and he lets out what sounds like a pained, nervous laugh. I can see the blood rushing to Val’s face, the veins in her neck coursing under her skin. Lasha isn’t important anymore. All of my anger washes away, shame receding with it, replaced by a deep need to be understood. To be equal.
“I don’t work with women,” Lasha sneers.
Val pivots like a mantis. “You’ll work for a woman, but not work with one?”
Ethan looks up from the stove’s flames. I can feel his eyes searching for mine.
“Miss, these are just stories from a dishonest girl who abandoned her family,” Lasha says, trying to tame the mantis. “A woman porter is bad luck. It makes the mountain angry. It’s not done.”
“Enough.” Val digs into her pocket, takes out a billfold, and counts off rupees. “Leave our bags at the door.”
“But, miss, she’s just telling stories—”
Val holds out the rupees. He looks less like a man than a hollowed, leafless tree. Lasha the sirdar isn’t one any longer, not on this trek.
“Tashi delek,” Lasha says, smiling. He takes the money and slinks away.
Norbu is at my side now. He puts his hand on my shoulder. Steady.
I thought I would have something to say to Lasha, some gloat, but I don’t even want to look at him. I don’t even want to be in the same room as him.
“I have to go back to my clients,” Norbu whispers.
I nod. “Go.”
Val puts her hand on my shoulder now—then pulls me towards her, holding me close, like a sister, an equal.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
My face is buried in her shoulder, and when the tears fall, no one can see them.
24
THE PILL IS CHALKY WHITE, MARKED WITH THE CODE NUMBER 250. It reminds me of the pills we swallow for Mani Rimdu. Pills for life, pills for health, pills for spirit. How can something that small truly calm one’s mind or feed one’s soul? The mikarus are haggard and weary, they’ve waited too long to take them.
Ethan gives me a crooked smile and swallows the Diamox with a guzzle of Snowy Geyser bottled water. A moment ago, he held his hand out to me and I shook it, accepting his apology when he finally mustered the courage to face me. “We were wrong,” he told me. “I was wrong.”
I knew Val hadn’t coaxed him into saying this—I saw the same look in his eyes when he gave me the money in that drafty hallway. A mix of shame and remorse. Daniel wasn’t as expressive, he mumbled sorry a few times, but he also held out two hands to me and shook them in a way that felt like I had earned his respect. And I understand. It makes sense: Why would these travelers want to get in the middle of a local drama? Of course they would try to move on from me. They would respect the old, more experienced sirdar. Val, even Ethan and Daniel, none of them cared I was a woman—they cared that I was being chased by my family, by Norbu, that I could be a danger to them.
Val is now with her notebook in hand, scribbling things down—maybe this very scene. Ethan is working with Daniel, cleaning camera equipment, all of them already moving on to the next problem. So unlike the Sherpa, but I am beginning to understand. Better to move on from things, in their way—very similar to us. Don’t dwell, move forward. Life is too impermanent to waste time. Ang is now Nima, a man is now a woman, but it really doesn’t matter.
I want to laugh, but I hold it in. Val must have a similar feeling, since she decides to put down her pen and pick up the teapot on the table. And then—how often does a mikaru do this?—she serves me tea. I wait until she sits and puts the mug to her lips before I dare take a sip. A guest, even if she serves me, must always remain a guest. Still, here I am: a girl porter sitting at a table with mikarus, despite all that’s happened. Meeting Val in Lukla less than a week ago, but nearly a lifetime now—if they came to the restaurant only a few minutes later, we never would have met.
The lodge door opens and four figures shuffle in, wind screaming behind them: the two girls with the wild hair and their pot bellied father, along with an exhausted Sherpa. The one with the fiery red hair stumbles, collapsing on the floor.
“Freddie! Freddie!”
They pick her up and place her on a bench by the door. “Tea! Bring tea!”
Norbu emerges from the kitchen, cradling a steaming pot and a cup. He hands over the tea, and the girl’s father and her guide hold her head up and drip hot liquid in her mouth. The other girl begins crying.
“Not good to lie down,” the guide advises the bearded mikaru. “Not good for head. Lift.”
They make the girl sit up and keep dripping tea in her mouth.
“Is there a doctor? Anyone here a doctor?”
The father looks around wildly as we huddle around the girl—me, Val, Ethan, her father, the exhausted trail Sherpa, and the girl with the blond hair.
Nurse Lanja taught me what happens when the brain swells. You stop walking and talking normally, you become confused and aggressive, like a drunk. For a foreigner, someone unaccustomed to the high altitude, it’s common. Even Sherpas can get it. Eventually, the lungs fill with liquid, you get so weak that you can’t move at all. All the great mountain mikarus suffered from these conditions. That’s why so many are still on the mountain, forever entombed in ice.
Looking over at this red-haired young thing, with her head slumped, slits for eyes, it’s clear she needs to descend. Now. The Sherpas are trying to tell her father, but he’s not listening. Hundreds of muscles and bones in a human’s body, hundreds of hurts. When altitude sickness comes, you feel them all. Thumping pain. Tormenting pain. Pressure in the skull, the mind, everywhere. Kneeling, I stroke the girl’s head.
“Ddaaa, whyss ma headdd hurtt sssoooo?”
“I had to carry her for five kilometers,” the exhausted Sherpa says to Norbu and me. “The father is so stubborn, he doesn’t want to turn back—he kept accusing me of making her condition seem worse in order to collect some kind of travel insurance money. He’s a fool. She needs to descend. Maybe he’ll listen to someone with the same skin color.”
The girl lets out a catlike moan, startling enough to cause the hair on my arms to stick up.
Ethan breathes deeply, closes his eyes—is he praying? Then he searches frantically for something in his day pack, pulling out a small blue bag with a white cross on it. “Let me,” he says to her father. “I’m an EMT.” He places the same tool I remember Nurse Lanja used on my father on the girl’s chest, then places those metal tongs in his ears, listening. He looks at me, no malice in his eyes now, then flings me an order: “Raise her head.”
And Norbu and I jump. Ethan puts his palm on the girl’s forehead, touches under her ears, her throat, the inside of her wrist.
“No fever,” he says, taking those tongs out of his ears. The heart rate must be fine, but Ethan still looks concerned. Might be a chest infection. Either way, she has to go down as soon as possible.
The girl groans, like a sick dog. Snap. Daniel shoots a photo.
“Get her into bed, keep her hydrated, and keep her head elevated,” Ethan instructs. “You have to leave in the morning, understand? Take it slow, but get down. The lower she goes, the better she’ll feel.”
The girl’s father rakes his fingers over his face. Sweat drips off his cheeks. Ethan puts a hand on his shoulder. I hear the word “helicopter.”
“Won’t fly up here,” the guide who carried her says in slow, deliberate English. “Air too thin, too dangerous. If she can stand and walk, she can walk down.”
“This is the last place for something to go wrong, get it? Tell your mikaru that,” Norbu says to me. “A chopper can’t rescue her any farther up.”
Ethan searches through his medical bag aga
in, finds what he’s looking for. “What’s her name?”
“Freddie. It’s—it was her mother’s name.”
Ethan holds the white Diamox in one hand, shakes the girl’s shoulder with the other. “Freddie, Freddie?”
“Nnnnnnwwwwhaaaaa?” the girl mumbles.
“Can you tell me your name?” Ethan asks. “What’s your name?”
“Fff-ff-reddeeee.”
“Okay, Freddie, I’m going to give you something, I want you to swallow it, okay?”
She nods. “Oookkkaayyy.”
Ethan motions to Norbu and me, we prop her head as he puts the pill in her mouth. “Tea.” The guide pours tea. “Swallow it, Freddie.”
“Taayss lyyykke cha-awwk.”
Snap. Daniel crouches low and close, camera in hand.
“Piss off!” the old mikaru yells, waving a hand at Daniel. Then he gently brushes his daughter’s cheeks, a bit of color slowly returning to them. “Thank you, son,” he says to Ethan.
“Get her to bed. And take this.” Ethan hands him a sheet of pills in plastic.
All of us help the girl up, slowly, supporting her weight. Her legs are so wobbly, she can barely lift them. Her father and the guide help her make it to the doorway and then down the corridor and they disappear.
Ethan walks over to Val, takes her hand. They don’t say anything, just embrace.
When Norbu looks at me, I see both worry and relief in his eyes, and then something else. He motions to me, shifting his head to one side. Follow me. I take his hand.
25
Everything is burning.
What is burning?
The eyes are burning.
Everything seen by the eyes are burning.
The hope is burning.
The mind is burning.
We’re on fire. We may not know it, but we’re on fire, and we have to
put that fire out.
We’re burning with desire.
We’re burning with craving. Everything about us is out of control.
WITH NO EYES TO WATCH US—NO MONKS TO PREACH, NO CLIENTS to disapprove, no parents to disappoint—my heart beats like a prayer drum. His beats just as strong.
This isn’t how I thought it would happen. I thought it wrong to lie together before becoming man and wife. And I am scared. I never got the chance to ask Val how it’s done, I’ve never placed my lips onto another’s, and when I try, Norbu pulls back in surprise. How many times in the last few days have I watched Val stroke Ethan’s face, press her lips to his. How easily this touch came to her. It made me wonder what it was like, to touch, to be touched, and when I try it now, I feel a suppressed joy spring from my body. A flutter in my heart, my lips. And something from him…something I only now understand.
Norbu doesn’t pull back the second time. I lace my fingers with his and rest them on my chest, place them over my breasts, feeling the up and down of my breathing, the beat of my heart under our intertwined hands. And then I take his hand and place it lower, feeling his touch inside me and my flower spread. His finger dancing nervously, then slower, more deliberate. My heart flutters now more than ever, spinning like a prayer wheel. I’m no longer the girl from the mountain. Eldest was left behind in Khunde, and scattered in Khumjung even before that. Maybe she died when my brother died.
The choice is mine. I get on top of him, this mountain of a man who I never fully understood and never gave a chance to. My skinny legs wrap around his torso. As we writhe together on the narrow cot, bodies sticky and hot despite the cold, I’m not sure of anything but this moment. And it doesn’t feel wrong. His touch, his smell and taste, it mixes with my own. There’s pain at first, sharp and pulsating, but it goes, filled with something else, something beyond our two bodies.
Animals have no guilt—why should we? We lie on top of each other in that narrow cot, just like I imagine two mikarus might. Like Val and Ethan are right now, I can hear their moans beyond the thin wall—or maybe it’s just the wind. Regardless, we are suddenly as carefree as any pair.
So what if we are discovered. My reputation cannot become any worse and I don’t care. I’ve already become everything they fear, and I’ve come out better for it. An affirmation, a new mantra, a rebirth. I wanted this to happen, thought of it every night even if I was ashamed to admit it to myself. What men tried to take by force, I’m giving to Norbu—and what would have happened on our wedding night, as strangers, is happening now, as something more, because it’s something we both choose, not an act forced upon us by circumstance. This is purer, this is more virtuous, because I made the choice, tradition be damned. His and mine, mine and his, mixed together in all the ways that matter. I didn’t ever think it would be like this, but it is. And I don’t feel an ounce of guilt that I enjoy it.
When it’s over, I keep my eyes open. And watch him. Counting the hairs on his chest, noticing a small scar under his nipple, another above his left eye. Like the moon when it’s skinny. He is doing the same with me. Norbu runs his fingertips across my cheek, tracing the line of my jaw, past my ear, touching my short hair. I shut my eyes and rub my cheek on that rough palm of his. Pressed against his body, I don’t even feel the cold. And in the morning, I’ll make sure I wake before him. I won’t be left alone this time.
“Two days to Base Camp,” he says as I’m lacing my boots. “Tomorrow, take them to Kalapathar if the weather’s no good for BC. Excellent views. Then do Base Camp after. If not, do it the other way around.”
“Kalapathar,” I echo.
“The monks say it’s the passageway used by the gods to climb Jomolangma. It’s the best views of the peak, exactly at sunset. And be careful in the ice fall. And in the glacier. Watch your steps, it’s full of crevasses.”
I nod. I know.
“Are you feeling the altitude?” he asks.
“I don’t think so. I have a small headache. I think it’s my nerves.”
“You didn’t seem nervous last night.”
“I was.”
He nods, finishes lacing his boots. “I was, too.” He puts on his shirt. I’m already fully dressed. “When we’re done up here, I’ll visit your father, we’ll smooth things over. All will be as before.”
It’ll never be as before, Norbu, you must see that.
His eyebrows scrunch together, pulling up that crescent-shaped scar. “I told you I would let you go to the city. And if you stayed here, you wouldn’t have to work. You won’t even have to cook or clean, I’ll hire a servant. Everything will be taken care of. You’ll be happy—I’ll make you happy.”
“And what happens to you if I go to the city? You said you hated it there. And if I stay here? Become a mother when I’ve barely become a woman, become old before my hair goes gray?”
He wrings his hands together, bites his lower lip with those white, white teeth.
“Norbu, I can’t go back to what I was. I’m someone else now.”
He doesn’t say anything, looks down, then back up at me.
“If I go home after all that’s happened and get married now, I can’t set my own path. I need to do that or I’ll never be happy, no matter what happens between us. Do you understand?”
“What if we work together?” he asks. “As man and wife, leading climbing teams? Would you consider that? Would that be enough?”
I shake my head. I don’t know if I’ll take my wages home or straight to Lukla and board one of those metal birds and leave, never to return. Maybe I would be happy to work with a man I trust, a man I love. But right now, I only know my path is to finish this trek and keep moving forward, not back.
“Nima?” he whispers, leaning towards me.
Norbu, I’m ashamed and afraid to tell you all this. Instead, I nod my head and do what’s easiest. For the first time, I lie to his face. “Yes, it would be enough.”
I curse myself for how easily I’m able to do it. And when I swallow I feel hollow inside.
Three hours later, we stop at Thukla Dhuka’s Yak Lodge. Norbu and I are separated agai
n. Dal bhat power. I can’t even taste the lentils, my mind won’t stop replaying the morning’s episode with Norbu. Our groups aren’t traveling together. Different paces, different sizes, different clients. Perhaps fate will pair us together, in Lobuche and Gorak Shep, or a few days later back in Lukla.
Could we work together, leading treks up the mountain, as man and wife?
“Nima. Nima!” Tugged from dream by Val’s voice. “We’re ready.”
There’s a change now. An unspoken difference I notice as I continue on with the mikarus. As if a higher social status was granted me when I transformed back into a woman. Now all of them—Ethan and Daniel included—look at my face when they speak to me, treat me the same way they might a mikaru woman.
Are they any different than us? It’s not a simple yes or no. It’s both, really. So deeply beyond any words, theirs is a reflection of my own future, different, and yet still the same.
We reach the Dughla Pass. It’s like the gods had flattened this place with hammers and lightning bolts. Massive ancient boulders scrawled in Nepali and English. Stone manis. And everywhere funeral plots and sacred flags—blue, yellow, green, red, white—sky, earth, water, fire, air.
“What is this place?” Daniel whispers, raising his camera.
“These are tombstones, Nima, aren’t they?” Val asks.
“Yes, but I can’t tell you much. I’ve never been here before.”
“I thought you’d been all the way to Base Camp.”
I shake my head and smile. “I thought you’d made it to Namche.”
“We’re both heading into unknown territory,” she says, smiling.
Val touches a massive stone, reads the name on it, touches the faded white kata scarves and prayer flags draped over the stone, scrapes ice and dirt off the bronze plate at its center. “Who was Babu Chhiri?”
My father, when he was still my father, often spoke of Babu Chhiri. A great man, he said, even though he had six daughters—cursed to be without an heir, just like him.