Every Lost Country Read online

  She can no longer pretend she isn’t also a fugitive, drawn back into the plight of her birth parents in Vietnam—as if this outcome, like certain cancers, were a genetic destiny, despite her years of ignoring it, of playing down the relevance of events that happened once in a distant land. (Like her friends, she has never seen any future in history and tries to live free of it.) Behind her sunglasses she shuts her eyes, but instant video of the slaughter at the base starts replaying. You should never have come back to Asia.

  She opens her eyes. “Why did you leave your nunnery, Choden?”

  Choden says nothing at first, and when she does speak, her English is wonky, halting. “Ah, well…it’s these three of us, Dolma and Pema and myself? We took the bus for Lhasa, a small pilgrimage to Jokhang Temple, but also there to join a protest against, ah, all these Chinese immigrants, overfilling Tibet? And so we did. We did these both. After that, it’s a…it’s a longer story. Now might be not the place to tell you.”

  “Sorry,” Amaris says. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Ah…we’ve a bit of a drop down yet, but I’m afraid we’re sure to meet flat places before long. Please open the, the box there and fetch us a map.”

  Sand grinds in the latch of the glove compartment. Amaris finds a flashlight and candles and matches and a pack of cigarettes and brings a sheaf of maps onto her lap. She takes her reading glasses out of the belly pack for her camera—loose now, like an emptied womb—and it hits her again. You’re not meant to give a shit about possessions at a time like this, but that video camera was more than a possession.

  They’re speeding up, a hot wind jetting in. Maps fly loose and crackle open. Choden pumps the brake like somebody driving on snow. The slope looks no steeper but the speedometer needle shivers toward thirty-five. “Tamp harder!” Amaris says, and Choden says evenly, “Pardon me?” but in fact she is braking harder, the truck skidding with each pressure. The base of the slope shudders up toward them: a flat expanse the colour of sulphur, like the bed of a dry spring. Choden calls out in Tibetan, maybe warning the others in the back. As they hit bottom and level out, the cab bounces and the whole frame shakes but then goes silent as they glide smoothly over the webbed clay. They slow down and roll to a stop near the far edge of the clay bed. Beyond the rim of it, the ground falls away again, more gently.

  “I suppose we’ll need a push,” Choden says softly. Then, in a firm voice, she calls something out her window. She wrinkles her nose. “Once we let the brakes rest.”

  “These maps are in Chinese,” Amaris says. “Can you read them?”

  “I can, sure.”

  “Why don’t you navigate, then. I can steer.”

  “I’d be grateful for a switch now, Amaris—my nerves are a little like those brakes.”

  They change places. The tailgate claps down. In the side mirror Amaris sees two robed monks brace themselves around the wheel-well and push, while Choden calls back to them. At the edge of the next downslope they give a heave and leap back on board and the truck rattles on.

  Amaris steers them straight into the sun. Late afternoon has turned the cab into a solar oven. Sweat needles and blurs her eyes, but she keeps her wet hands on the wheel, glancing at the odometer as it slowly clicks over, more distance between them and the base. The slope is gentle at first but gradually it steepens and she has to work the brakes until she can smell them starting to burn. After each burst of pumping, the truck reaccelerates. She’s using the hand brake now too. It’s starting to feel stripped. Beside her on the bench seat Choden somehow dozes, the map open in her lap and her limp hands on it, fluttering with the truck’s bounces. They’re going to lose control, Amaris can feel it, like a child on a bicycle wobbling downhill. “Wake up now!” she says, but the grade is starting to ease off and she steers them down and finally lands them on another flat stretch of cracked yellow earth, a smell of sulphur gusting in. They slow and roll to a halt and she breathes—then hears the tailgate drop down and sees, in the mirror, the monks bracing themselves to push again. “No!” she calls out. “The brakes are dead!” But they only push harder, as if thinking she’s urging them on. She tries to stop them with what’s left of the brakes, but the monks grunt and keep shoving, forcing the truck toward the far side, the next downslope. “Choden…!” The nun’s eyes are already open; after a moment she says, “Ah.” With no special urgency she leans out her window and calls back in Tibetan. A monk replies and the truck creaks to a stop, close enough to give a glimpse over the edge—the next downslope steeper, too steep.

  Amaris lets her soaked forehead sink to rest on the wheel. “Thanks,” Choden tells her, seemingly unfazed by this latest close call. It’s the sort of casual, good-natured fatalism that’s been exasperating Amaris since she arrived in Kathmandu. She can’t find it charming, as Book seems to—not right now. An adult’s job is to control whatever’s controllable, especially out here, where less and less is.

  Book tumbles out with the others and stands by a cairn of large, flat stones marking the outlet where this dry spring must once have spilled over into the gully that starts below it and loops down into the distance. It must meet the river gorge somewhere ahead. Each piled stone is engraved like a clay tablet with a sort of embellished cuneiform. Prayers. It should be some comfort to know that others once came this way and marked their passage with prayers, but it doesn’t help now. It doesn’t help to be reminded that something that once flowed can stop flowing. Sophie is down there somewhere, captured or on the run.

  Amaris looks like she’s trying not to faint. He grips her arm and says, “Can I have that map?”

  “What…? Oh, here.”

  “Your sunglasses.”

  “What about them?”

  Gently he lifts them off, peers into her black coffee eyes. “Okay. Sit for a minute, in the shade here”—the eastern side of the cairn—“head down between your knees.”

  She sits, her bum resting on the parka wrapped around her waist. He dries his palm and sets it on her brow. “Christ, how hot was it up in that cab?”

  “Yeah, it was.” She sounds sedated. “You’re still barefoot, Lew.”

  “Just keep your head down, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Okay. I’m okay.”

  The others have unloaded Lhundup. Sangye stands guard over the slumped Palden, as if that’s necessary. Book joins Sonam, Norbu and the monks around the truck and in silence they push it toward the edge of the dry spring. As they heave the front wheels over the raised edge, they cry out, Book and the others, even the monks, all voicing the same raw, involuntary howl, like ice age hunters driving game over a cliff. The truck clatters and thumps away down the slope. After a few seconds it goes slapstick, catching air as it pitches over ruts and stones and then, farcically fast, tips and grates to a stop near the bottom.

  They carry Lhundup back to the cairn, where Amaris waits. Book, Norbu and Choden examine the map, Choden translating. Her face is very flushed. She and Amaris, like Lhundup, will need water soon. Norbu might be willing to make do with somebody’s blood; his nostrils quiver and he shuns eye contact with Choden and Book. On the map, the Chinese base is marked clearly, and the gully leading down from this dry spring seems to correspond with a dotted line running west to intersect the Khiong River at a village called Tyamtso. The map’s scale makes the direct distance just ten or fifteen kilometres, but he, Choden and Norbu seem to agree that walking directly, up on the open plain, is not an option. They’ll have to follow the winding gully.

  “Let’s go,” Book says. “We need to hurry, please.”

  Over her shoulder Choden carries something like a long, furled Torah scroll: one of the stretchers they found under the truck benches. Book, two monks, and Palden Jangbu, with his punch-drunk eyes and turban of gauze, bear Lhundup on the other stretcher, down into the deepening kiln of the gully. Norbu walks beside Palden with the submachinegun. Amaris, still woozy, offers to help with the stretcher, but Book says, “We were shaded in the back—you
were driving. You’ve got to take it easy now.” The young nun jerks along with the older one’s help, the rest of the party trailing.

  The grade is gentle and the footing is gravel and firm sand; it would be an easy hike down if they weren’t so burdened, parched and exhausted. The gully walls are about two men high and the streambed twenty steps across. After some time, a monk takes over for Book with the stretcher. Moments later there’s a heavy throbbing in the air. The child seems to fall or be swung off Sonam’s shoulders, then Sonam and the child are down and the pregnant Lasya drops beside them. The others, reacting much faster than Book and Amaris, are down, too, lying in matching windrows along the gully walls like casualties in a shelled trench. Amaris looks dreamily skyward. Book tackles her and lies next to her on the hot sand of the streambed, his arm over her shoulders, holding her prone.

  A khaki helicopter skims over the gully a few hundred metres upstream.

  “Oh,” she says vaguely, “shit. They see us, you think?”

  His hand on her brow. “They may not be looking for just us.”

  “What…? What’s happening, Lew? Am I dying or something?” She shudders, chuckles with what seems a kind of giddy amusement. “Come on, Doc, give it to me straight.” Her teeth are small and the smile is too gummy, the bared gums vulnerably pink, and it’s touching to see them, her only imperfect, unguarded feature.

  “You’re dehydrated—feverish. But it’s not heat stroke. We’ll lose the sun soon, then we’ll get down to the river. I want you to go on the stretcher for a bit.”

  “No way.”

  “I figured you’d say that. Look, just for a bit, so you—”

  “Not if she isn’t.”

  “Lasya, you mean? Or Pema, with the leg? Or—”

  “Take your pick,” she says. “Why don’t we all rest here?”

  “We have to get down to the river.” He starts to rise but Norbu hisses at him and Choden signals him to stay down. Now Palden, prone between Norbu and Sangye, gives Book a strange, intense look that seems to mix suspicion and entreaty. Book tells her, “The Chinese think you and I are collaborators, for one thing. Especially now.”

  “Because we broke out?”

  “That too.” He’ll explain about his “confession” when she’s less dazed. Now, eyeing the Tibetans strewn around them, he says, “I can’t understand why they don’t just let these people leave if they want to. It’s like the Himalayas are a Berlin Wall now.”

  The sky starts to pulsate and roar and the copter reappears, again buzzing across the gully, though this time downstream of them. It vanishes and the roaring recedes, approaches, recedes again but hovers not far off in the sky. They lie low. The sun nods out of view. The roaring gradually fades. Dusk rolls down the gully like a flash flood and he feels her trembling in the chill.

  The party slumps onward. Book’s own pain deepens, diversifies. His bare heels and soles burn, but he doesn’t think of slowing—he’s going on love and adrenaline, a sick surging of dread in his belly and chest. But an hour goes by and it’s dark, no sign of the river, the others staggering. They’ll have to stop.

  By flashlight Choden finds a cave, five feet up in the north wall of the gully. Everyone easily fits inside, though all except the child have to crouch. A gap in the cave’s roof—the desert floor—has been closed over with flattened oil tins layered like shingles. Choden shines the flashlight toward the back: a firepit full of ash, an old shrine, an oxidized copper Buddha, the stubs of incense sticks.

  Book says, “Are we near a monastery? Choden, is this…?”

  She hunches toward him and Amaris, rattling something in her hand. He aims his penlight: bullet shells green with verdigris. In her soft brogue she says, “I guess it was a place where Tibetan resisters would hide away, some years ago. Or, perhaps, both a hermit’s retreat and a fighter’s hideaway. Some of the resisters were monks, you see. They tried to drive the Chinese out, but nothing became of it but so much dying. My father, he was a resister, too, and he was imprisoned awhile, before I was born.”

  Amaris mutters something—maybe sorry—and from the marsupial pack on her belly she brings out matches, candles and cigarettes she must have found in the truck. By the flashlight’s sweeping, she picks out a spot on the floor and sinks down, wrapping her parka around her. “Think I’ll rest here a bit,” she says, slurring, and Book says quickly, “Right, good—rest. But just a few hours. But you need to rest.”

  “What…?”

  “Just sleep. It’s okay.”

  He watches as she tugs off her boots, leaving the warm liners on her feet, and ranks the boots carefully beside her. Then she removes her watch, feeds the strap through the buckle, secures it, and places it on the cave floor, its face toward her face. All this though she’s almost asleep. He knows better than to try to sleep himself. He’ll be awake until he finds Sophana, and it’s torture, torture by triage, not to go on now, down to the river alone, but he has Lhundup to see to, also Palden, Pema, Lasya, even Amaris. Still—if he loses Lhundup in the night, God knows how he’ll decide whether to stay or go after Sophie.

  Amaris wakes from dreams of frantically pumping a failing brake while a voiceover puns failing break-up! and somehow she knows it’s the death of her engagement, at the end of film school, followed by the early abortion that Emil, her ex-fiancé, never knew about. In the midst of a true heartbreak, the truer sufferings of people in desperate countries seem far less real than your own. Now she is actually involved in the sort of graphic crisis you glimpse on news channels back home, and maybe that’s why she just dreamed of Emil—she’s nostalgic for the smaller, surmountable disasters of her life up until now.

  She rolls onto her side, looks at what should be a hallucination. A candle flickers in the ash of the firepit and dark shapes lie or sit around it: Norbu and Sangye shakily smoking, old Dechen smoking her pipe. A second candle lights up the ruined shrine and, on the walls above it, faded paintings of robed, seated figures and a cartoonish blue ogre with a sword. Choden and the older nun and two monks prostrate themselves in front of the shrine, fingers steepled under their chanting lips. Sonam and Lasya lie on their sides, facing each other, with the sleeping child between them. They’re whispering in an anxious tone. It’s hard to watch. Amaris hates scenes that feel apt to break her open.

  A few steps away, this side of the firepit, Book sits beside the sleeping Lhundup in a shaft of moonlight (a small aperture has been opened in the fuel-tin roof). He’s in his black-rimmed glasses, studying the map, his sweater cuffs pulled down over his fingers. His cigarette smoke twines up the moonbeam as if it’s a ventilation shaft. Stethoscope around his neck, tousled hair, those sideburns—he looks like a haggard intern pulling an all-nighter. His eyes close as he takes a drag. He lets out a gruff sigh, more like a groan, but still it reminds her of the other, sensual Lew, which reminds her of base camp, hot chai and her cozy tent, which links back to home, her neat office, the enclosing ritual of her routines.

  “How you feeling?” he asks softly.

  Terrified, she thinks, but says only, “I can’t stop thinking of water. That river.”

  “We’ll go there now—the moon’s up. I was going to wake you. Your fever’s gone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just felt.” He passes her his cigarette. She draws in the bad tobacco and, too sore to move, lies looking up at him. For a moment their gazes mesh.

  “I thought doctors prefer Camels, Lew.”

  His faint smile is pained; it hits her that he might have lost his patient and she asks, “Is he okay?”

  “Still here. Tough as a post.”

  “What’re you finding on the map?”

  “Trying to figure out where Sophie could be.”

  “What…? She’s at base camp, isn’t she?”

  He takes off his glasses. In the back of the cave now Choden and Norbu are whispering.

  “What the hell is going on, Lew?”

  “Zhao told me she’s being tracked alon
g the river. By those border guards.”

  “What?”

  “Down where we’re headed now.”

  “Oh my God—she came after you?”

  He pulls off his stethoscope, stuffs it in his kit, barely nods. The cave hums with that whispering, chanting.

  “Fuck, Lew, I’m sorry. I hope…but hang on—”

  “Me too.”

  “Hang on a minute—don’t worry,” she says, thinking Unarmed child, zero threat, they’ll be careful, they’ll treat her gently.

  Then something very different occurs to her.

  “Wait a minute. Is this why we’re going this way? Through this desert?”

  “What do you mean?” he says, almost snaps. “What other…this is the only possible way to go. Choden and Norbu felt the same.”

  “Do they know about Sophie?”

  “I didn’t want to complicate things.”

  She sits up, her professional instincts zinging. Pain and fear throughout her body sharpen those instincts, if not her wits: “And if…if the best possible route hadn’t matched your own needs? What would you have done then?”

  Pause. “I really don’t know.”

  “Wait,” she says, “hang on.”

  “It’s always triage,” he says softly.

  “Would we even be here, Lew? I mean, is this why we broke out of jail and gunned down Zhao and those soldiers and probably screwed ourselves completely—so you could look for your daughter?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, Sophie’s probably safe now anyway! The Chinese wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They wouldn’t have hurt us, either! Oh my God, I’m right, that’s what happened, isn’t it? You’ve got all of us…you keep getting us into deeper and deeper shit!”

  “Keep your voice down. The first I knew of it, they were jumping Palden. I was as surprised as you.”