Every Lost Country Read online

  Rich, fatty lumps and strands of meat in a salt broth thickened with some kind of flour and spiced with chilies. She’s on her second large clay bowlful. She has vowed she will never be the sort of vegetarian who makes exceptions to avoid upsetting or inconveniencing meat-eating adults, but her rescuers have offered this stew and she can’t get enough of it. And the tea, butter tea, with its grossly rancid odour but a greasy, salty taste she seems to crave. Every time she looks up from this endless meal (a bowl of stewed vegetables has just appeared, onions and maybe cabbage with mustard and a savoury spice she doesn’t know), the large room holds more villagers, young and old. They are pushing in through the low doorway and spreading neatly around her in the lamplight, as if they have their own customary places on the woven rug, the packed clay floor—as if they often gather here to stare and stare at mute visitors exhibited on milking stools and lavishly fed. Some of them talk among themselves and giggle or laugh loudly, some point at Sophie’s clothing or nose ring, most of them beam when she smiles her thanks with her lips closed, resolutely chewing. The older folks nod back while sticking their tongues way out and down like campy rock stars—some sort of local greeting? Their eyes crinkle warmly.

  Except for the rainbow stripes of the women’s aprons, most of the clothing around her is dark, brown or black, which along with her fatigue and shock deepens this scene’s narcotic strangeness and makes the black-haired faces seem to float in the gloom like flickering bronze masks, the eye slots shadowed by the beams of a hanging storm lamp and smaller lamps here and there, wicks in clay bowls full of melted butter—she saw them back in Nepal, in Tarap, a stone village full of Tibetans…. An ancient woman with a milky walleye and a string of beads like Yiayia’s kombolói sits cross-legged, mumbling a chant through her gums and twirling what looks like an antique percussion instrument—Sophie knows it’s a prayer wheel—as if trying to appease or ward off the foreigner.

  More villagers cram in, their eyes bright with curiosity in faces still slack and blank with sleep, like people waking and rushing to view some interesting emergency. It must be near midnight. This food is ballast and Sophie’s sense of hallucination starts to fade. Her host, who looks a bit like Johnny Depp—mid-length hair parted in the middle, earring, bladelike cheekbones, a skimpy goatee and teeth that look like they’ve been tended by a Hollywood dentist—sits with his pretty, pregnant wife on a cot between a fireplace and an altar where a butter lamp glows in front of clay Buddhas and a pack of cigarettes, fruit, a small photograph of the Dalai Lama. Already villagers have flung sentences at her with the words Dalai Lama eagerly stressed, pointing at the altar photo or making framing gestures with hands and fingers. She knows images of the Dalai Lama are banned here.

  When Tenzin, her movie star host, first led her back here from the bridge, there were three small children asleep on the cot where he and Karma, his wife, now sit. As Sophie entered, they leapt up, surrounding her, chattering, then ran out the door barefoot and returned, in what seemed like moments, trailing more children and grown-ups, too. There are at least twenty kids here now, popping out from between the shoulders or through the legs of the adults to peer at Sophie. Karma and two of the girls are serving tea. Tenzin frowns pensively at Sophie and occasionally addresses her, as if hoping that as the meal revives her, her comprehension of Tibetan will improve.

  “Picture please, Dalai Lama?” A schoolboy, maybe ten, stands beside her, his sooty, snotty face slightly above hers. He eyes her with a smirk, as if he has just said something jeering instead of polite and pious. With both hands he presents a glass containing a creamy grey liquid. A clay bowl has appeared with green plums, a yellow apple, an apricot.

  “You speak English?” she asks the boy. He cackles and looks over his shoulders and jabbers something to his friends or parents or to the village in general.

  “You have to tell them the guards might come. The Chinese.”

  The boy grins with gaps where the eye teeth should be and he backs away. Still, Sophie thinks, she hopes, Tenzin understands her. At the bridge he shooed away the dog with a stern hiss, a lazy kick—Sophie was too dazed and tired to object—and as the dog grovelled away ahead of them down the cairn steps and along a lane between flagstone walls, past other rumbling mastiffs, Sophie kept pointing upriver toward the guards’ camp and babbling, The Chinese, Chinese guards! Soldiers! Tenzin eyed her obliquely, seeming to listen, and she’d tapped her watchless wrist and showed two fingers, hoping he would grasp that she knew they were a couple of hours away at most.

  The drink has a fermented smell and a gluey thickness, and suddenly she feels full, way beyond full, but doesn’t want to rebuff this kindness. The first sip tingles in her mouth like orange juice gone sour. Chang: her father and Mingma drank it in Tarap, her father describing it as mildly alcoholic—not a bad description of himself, she’d thought, a bit reproachfully. He said she could try a small mug. She sniffed it and passed. Tenzin rises with a tin jug in hand and tops up the glass she has barely drunk from and speaks to her again in Tibetan. As if alcohol might loosen her up enough to speak. He points at her glass and seems to ask something, his voice a hospitable growl.

  “Yes,” she lies, “it’s good,” and she drinks deeper, smiles. A small girl darts in and pokes at her braces and dashes back to her laughing friends. There’s someone behind Sophie. Hands in her hair. She turns far enough to see a woman in a small stetson, kneeling on the rug, starting to braid her hair in tiny plaits. The woman’s kneeling makes Sophie uncomfortable. Please, she wants to say, but the woman clucks her tongue and juts her solid chin and Sophie turns back toward the crowd, who laugh as if the scolding, the braiding, are part of a familiar comic routine. But the feel of those rhythmic tugs at the scalp, firm yet gentle, make Sophie’s throat ache. Her yiayia still braids her hair sometimes. It seems months since Sophie has been touched, not just twenty-four hours or so since Kaljang’s goodnight embrace outside her tent: Don’t fear about it, Sophie. We’ll get your father back. Don’t cry.

  “Picture please, Dalai Lama?” the sooty boy repeats. Grateful for the distraction, she glances down, digs into the daypack at her feet and brings out a pen and the quantum physics book. Opens it to one of the blank endpapers and draws. The boy zips back to her side and peeks over her shoulder, as does the braiding woman, and now others as well, jostling in to see. With light, relaxed lines, she frames the Dalai Lama’s high round forehead, narrow eyes crinkling with merriment behind shaded glasses, small, mischievous mouth, his robes and bare shoulder. It’s a crappy ballpoint but the sketch, somewhere between caricature and gesture drawing, is recognizable. Likenesses have always been easy for her. There are gasps as the face takes form. The crowd jams in closer and the smell is dense—peppery sweat, butter and, oddly, sulphur—not bad smells at the moment, but it’s hard to get a breath, like being locked in a closet crammed with wool and fur coats.

  She deckles the page out of the paperback’s spine and gives it to the boy and there’s delighted laughter and what sounds like wild acclaim. Small hands grab at the drawing the boy holds to his chest. She should draw another but she’s starting to feel ill, stifled, her stomach bloated. The braiding woman and Tenzin must sense her distress, because now they’re pulling, shooing people back from her. Tenzin leans over and talks into her face. There’s a question in his words. Yes, she nods, hoping it’s the right answer. Yes, I think I need to use the toilet. Yes, I think I need to sleep.

  The gathering breaks up quickly, parents herding children away, old men and women sticking out their tongues with a smile and backing out the low doorway. Karma, who’s about Amaris’s size except for her belly, leads Sophie into a back room where a butter lamp glows before a shrine across from a low, wooden-frame bed. Karma speaks slowly for a few seconds, pointing in various directions and then indicating a clay pot at the foot of the bed. Backing out of the small room, she bows and smiles warmly, pulling shut a crooked door that leaves a foot of space between the top and the lintel.

 
; Sophie curls in a ball on a caved mattress that smells like bran and straw. The room teeters as if she has drunk too much chang, not half a glass. The pillow has a faintly scalpy, rancid smell and the blankets are musky. Tenzin and Karma’s bed. Sophie will get up and thank them but insist that they sleep in their own room. And she’ll find the toilet. Her stomach is tossing, bloated. Last night with her first real hunger pangs she did feel some concern, but also satisfaction, thinking the one thing she might gain from this crisis was a slight loss of weight. She’s hardly bulimic but now wonders if she should stick her finger down her throat. The thought of how her bingeing and vomiting in a poor Asian village would upset her father now seems a strong endorsement of the act. But not in that chamber pot. She has to find the toilet. She thinks the thought again, more insistently, like the last thoughts of a girl sinking in a river, trying not to drown but tiring of the fight. Yes, I must stroke for the surface. I really must swim for the surface.

  For days after she and Scott Tyler crossed their own line, she had dreams like the ones that now kick-start her from heavy sleep, dreading the arrival of cops, guards, a SWAT team. In the five days until that knock at the door, she’d felt either defiantly proud (she hadn’t just sat around ranting about injustice, she’d acted) or horrified, disbelieving. If only they don’t arrest us. If only we hadn’t done it. If only we’d done it better. The usual monsoon of her moods, but with a real crisis to feed off. Unwelcome thoughts of their “action” would hit her at random times—when she was in physics class, or helping Yiayia out of the bathtub, or drawing a cartoon for the school’s online paper—and they would leave her flushed and winded, as if thrusting their way up into awareness from a place of tight confinement.

  It had been his idea, a big idea, and she was crazy about him and didn’t want to lose him, and like the others in their group she’d agreed at first, passionately, not thinking much past the moment’s enthusiasm. It’s fun and easy to commit to some bold thing when the date seems far away. So they made what-if plans, and then, step by step, refined them, and then, as the distant date somehow swooped toward them, uneasily firmed them up. The others started murmuring second thoughts. In the end, they backed out quietly, one by one, but Sophie couldn’t seem to, not with Scott insisting he’d act alone if he had to, and her own self daring her on, and also—yes—the distant echo of her father’s voice “joking” about lefties who talked a good fight and never fought so much as a cold.

  And so, drunk on the romance of their righteous daring, they’d stumbled onward the whole way and now here they stood, alone and incredulous. He looked terrified and finally it struck her—he’d been terrified all along. He’d been waiting for her to call it off, to talk him out of it, so he could remain the fearless one who would have acted, who only backed off because his girlfriend begged him to and he didn’t want to scare her. They were lurking in the alley between Café Amorgos and a boarded-up coin laundry, Scott wiping his upper lip, checking the time on his cellphone every thirty seconds until she wanted to shriek in his ear. She’d never seen him like this. His breath smelled rotten. Her heart kicking upward into her throat. For a moment their eyes met and his glance seemed to recoil and implode and she knew that all she had to say was Let’s get out of here and he would nod in relief and they’d be gone.

  She bit back the words, partly in fury at him, and, strangely, at her father, as if he had put her up to this. She glanced around the corner of the café—the patio was closed for repaving, one of the reasons they’d chosen the spot—and west up Danforth. Alex Diflakis would be lumbering along any minute. He was a talker and proud of the afternoon job he’d held since he was fifteen. He’d been heard calling himself the Human Brinks Truck, which had convinced Scott that he must mule thousands of dollars from his uncle’s diner to the credit union at four every day. Enough of the kids knew his schedule that it was a miracle he hadn’t been robbed. When somebody asked what would happen if he ever was robbed, Alex said insurance would cover it. Scott felt that if they got lucky they might land “four or five K,” enough to save the homeless shelter and kitchen on Church Street, whose government funding had been cut and, now dependent on donors, was on the verge of closing. The moral math seemed sound. Basically, they’d be brokering a transfer payment from an insurance firm to an endangered soup kitchen.

  Alex Diflakis was a big guy and had been since grade seven, but nervous accents yellowed his bragging chatter, which he delivered in a high, throttled voice. His slabby face was always sweating. Scott, who was skinny but fit and had a cocky, cold stare, said Alex would fall apart when confronted—at least by their full group, the six of them. Now Alex came hulking up Danforth in massive skateboarder shorts and basketball shoes, his pale moon-face and black curls haloed by the sun behind him. Sophie and Scott avoided each other’s eyes as they turned their backs to the street and pulled on tight ski masks. She struggled with hers, swearing under her breath, then realized the trouble: she was shaking her head in disbelief as she tried to work the thing on.

  They ducked behind a small PVC Dumpster as an old Greek in a fisherman’s cap tapped past the mouth of the alley with his cane. Alex would be next. There was still time to bow out, stay hidden, just let him pass. They rose and lurched like zombies out of the alley and grabbed him, Scott on the outside, Sophie inside. Drew him back into the alley as if hustling him offstage in a comic skit, Alex limp now, flopping, all of them talking over each other like clumsy actors. This way, here. We just want what’s in your, uh, your daypack. “What?” The bag. The money. “Wait!” We’ll let you go if, uh …

  “But I don’t have a daypack!”

  “Hurry,” Scott said. “What? Just—just the bag there.”

  “It’s a satchel,” Alex said miserably.

  “Just give us the money!”

  “I can’t, like, just hand it over.”

  “We’ve got knives!” Scott lied.

  “But I’d have to pay it back!” he said in a choked falsetto. “Like, hundreds of dollars.”

  “Hundreds?” Scott said.

  “You don’t have insurance?” Sophie said, and Alex’s bovine eyes rolled toward her, as if he was shocked to hear a girl speaking behind the ski mask.

  “Don’t move,” Scott said, “or I’ll use the knife! Give us the—just that bag there.”

  At the mouth of the alley the old Greek reappeared. He grinned, as if not quite getting what was happening. Or finding it funny. Across the wide street a man in a red-streaked apron stood with his hands on his hips, looking both ways, checking the traffic.

  “Now, Alex!” Scott hissed, poking a finger into his kidney.

  “You know me?” Alex sounded almost gratified. The big man in the apron was coming, dodging cars and taxis, yelling, either at the honking traffic or at them. Alex peered down, saw Scott’s poking finger and wrenched his body clear. In the same motion he swung the satchel strap over his head and let the bag fall, then staggered backward, while Sophie and Scott also backed away and now turned to run—Alex and Scott and Sophie all fleeing the fallen bag like a suddenly ticking bomb. She glanced back as the man in the bloody apron thumped past Alex and the bag and kept after them, roaring that he was on their asses, they better run for it, poustithes, he was coming for them. Though the bag was still lying there untouched, Alex was shouting, “No problem! I only keep a bit of it in there anyhow!”

  Choden leans far forward, her squinting eyes, behind the strap-on glasses, just above the steering wheel, her plump hands gripping the top of the wheel as if it’s a ledge she’s peering over. Despite her tense posture, her voice is calm. She and Amaris, side by side in the cab, are trading names and a few details (Choden used to drive the supply truck between her nunnery and a large old town a long way from here, and she always liked that). Her composure must be infectious—or maybe Amaris has run dry of adrenaline. Maybe you’re in shock. Maybe this new feeling, almost like calm, like a calm dream, is what shock is for.

  In neutral, the troop carrier ratt
les downhill over a tussocky gravel slope. The grade so far is gentle. The speedometer’s quivering needle shows between twenty and twenty-five kilometres per hour. Below and ahead to the west, running perpendicular to their route, there’s a seam of shadow—a valley or gorge—and on the other side, bare hills budding into snowless peaks that rise to meet Lawson’s high pyramid and the other ice giants. The gorge, Amaris sees, must be a lower part of the river valley they followed last night—God, only last night!—and if you trace the shadow of the gorge back, you can see where it must feed down out of the high peaks. Maybe Book is right and they’ll be able to get down to the river and from there try to hike back up to the border.

  Through the slot window behind her head, Amaris looks down into the shadowy back of the truck and finds Book huddled over Palden and Lhundup. The small girl’s father (his name is Sonam—Choden has told her all the names) kneels beside Book, helping. Norbu has completed his transformation from paramedic into paramilitary—he and his friend Sangye sit armed at the ends of the facing benches, where the Chinese guards sat before. She can’t tell if they’re trembling all over, or if it’s the truck, or her own trembling.