Every Lost Country Read online

  “You must have joined the fight, though, once it started, right?”

  “Maybe I was wrong about your fever,” he says coldly.

  That counterpoint of throaty chanting—like the ashram cassettes her adoptive sister used to play—sounds more and more absurd, ironic. As if prayers can draw a different result from the air. Maybe Zhao was right about Book, she thinks, maybe he really was up there to help the Tibetans…and at that moment he adds, “Of course I didn’t help them attack Palden—I’d just cut a deal with Zhao, to keep Sophie safe—and the rest of us.”

  “A what?”

  Softly, tersely, he describes his video confession and she listens and grinds the cigarette butt into the cave floor and says finally, “So…now we’re wanted as self-confessed spooks and pro-Tibet agents as well as, as murderers and invaders?”

  “I said you and Sophie had nothing to do with it.”

  “And they’re going to buy that.”

  If nothing else, if they make it back alive, she’ll dig a film out of this, with their desert ordeal as the frame. Book and his back chapters. His encrypted truths. She’s seen it before, how altruists always have an angle, how the high-minded end up sparking more pain and carnage than all the “bad boys” of the world.

  “Lew, are you saying they’ll believe that Sophie and me…?”

  “I’m saying it’s the wrong time to ask me.”

  “And you—I mean, I’m really starting to wonder here, Lew—how can I be sure your confession was actually fake?”

  “Fuck,” he whispers, “we’re all losing it, already. I feel ready to kill and you’re already getting …” He rakes a hand through his messy hair, folds up the map.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  “It was a simple question,” she prods, though at the same time it hits her, the other her, fully: the girl might still be out there, somewhere. They really do have to move.

  They climb down through the mouth of the cave into the bitter cold of a desert night and for some hours they walk in silence. The moon subsides. Cassiopeia blazes down with a cold, stabbing clarity and that radiant W seems to taunt them all with its reminder of the big questions, now reduced, for Book, to Why did she leave, what was she thinking, when did she do it, where is she now? Andromeda’s galactic fog—first cloud to appear in the sky for days—glows more clearly than he’s ever seen it. Two million light years off, it was the remotest thing anyone saw from the earth before the first telescope, as he’d explained once to his children, both crowding his lap in the Muskoka chair on the battered dock in the Thirty Thousand Islands. Early fall. Pavlos, that hyperkinetic young animal, could listen only in spasms as Book charted the skies, but the girl tuned in with her usual intense, silent stamina. (The warmth of his children in the cold of the universe, the burning sweetness of neat bourbon.) She never forgot a star once he’d told her, while Book himself was now losing some of the details he’d once had by heart. Follow the arc to Arcturus. At least she would not be totally lost, with these skies as her map. Then speed on to Spica.

  The last star goes out like a coal and the dawn’s thin light infiltrates the gully. Their route swithers downward. The first, faint sounds of the river waft up to them.

  You never know what love is going to require of you; you just hope you’ll be equal to the crisis.

  In the morning, up on the flat roof, in hot sunlight and the cold air that x-rays her breaths silver against a violet sky, Sophie has her intermission in paradise. When she woke, Karma, carrying what looked like a bundle of towels, led her to a stone outhouse (two holes in a dirt floor) as cold as a freezer, scattered with dormant flies, then up a path between mown fields along a steaming, sulphurous creek to an oasis: a small depression bowered by nut and apricot trees and luxuriant shrubs, maybe rhododendrons, where a blue-green pool smouldered with a faint sulphur stench. Brimstone in paradise. Karma pointed, instructing, but Sophie was already stripping down. After the past two nights, and the three weeks before that, her desire for hot water easily trounced her shyness (she finds herself big—not fat, she’s actually thin, but tall and muscled, jockish in a way she dislikes). She slid in up to her mouth and heard her own long, erotic sigh without embarrassment. Currents in the spring bubbled like jets in a Jacuzzi. For blissful seconds she lay perfectly still until she realized that the pregnant Karma was soaping and scrubbing her clothes and bloodied socks on the stones where the spring brimmed over into the creek. “Stop,” Sophie said weakly, “please don’t!” Karma grinned over, showing a gorgeous silver tooth Sophie would die to have, and said something cheerfully dismissive.

  They strolled back down along the creek, Karma insisting on carrying the washed clothes and Sophie’s hiking shoes. Sophie now wore a tight blouse and a black, sleeveless wraparound dress, sashed at the waist. Chuba, Karma called it. Karma’s own black chuba hung to her ankles, Sophie’s to mid-calf; Karma kept looking her up and down and chuckling.

  Now Sophie sits alone on the roof with a meal of warm flatbread and sweet almonds and a clay bowl of creamy, salty yogurt and butter tea and a single, perfect apricot. Last night she bolted pieces of fruit compulsively, but this one fruit she eats slowly, tasting, with all of her nerves and cells, the tart and tender, lush flesh. Sensing she’ll never forget this apricot. This tiny amber world.

  Around her up here, the flat roofs of other smartly whitewashed mudbrick houses, spicy smoke like incense rising. The rhythmic clang of a yak’s bell as a girl leads it by the nose ring up the lone street. Prayer flags on its horns. It jangles past. It seems to wear furry black jodhpurs. She sees the bridge, the river’s other, sunless side and the high embankment split by the gully that she walked down last night. It’s not a long bridge, a wide river, but she feels (as she always feels things: with conclusive intensity) that she has crossed over into another world, a safer place. She guesses the guards must have turned back, thinking she has retreated upriver.

  For some moments, clean and warm and fed and safe, things feel so close to perfect she forgets how far from perfect they are. Those few moments, then the change. Across the river a dog barks frantically, and others dogs, closer by, respond. She spits the apricot stone into the bowl. She can’t see motion on the bridge or on the far shore, but the barking amplifies. She swallows the last piece of bread. The tea’s dregs have a sour, cheesy aftertaste. She’s crawling toward the hole in the roof when the chapped, dirty face of one of Karma’s sons pops up. He beckons dramatically. She follows him down the ladder onto the second floor, then down a stairway—it’s hardly more than a ladder—into the main room, where Karma, shouldering Sophie’s daypack, frowns, speaks softly, opens the door. The boy grips Sophie’s hand as Karma leads them into a street full of barking dogs. There’s Tenzin, towering over a squat older man and speaking urgently, pointing up the street. For a flash he meets Sophie’s glance, looks away, continues as if he hasn’t seen her.

  She and the child follow Karma past the outhouse and along the creek, between pyramids of reaped grain, to the hot spring with its curtain of shrubs and dense trees clustered with fruit. She hears the voices of women and children, bathing or washing clothes. She figures this is where she’ll be hiding, but Karma gives her her daypack and points onward and tells the boy something. He tugs Sophie’s hand and runs with her across a sweep of stubble toward a brilliant yellow field with a few high sunflowers poking up out of it. The valley wall, the far border of this garden world, rises beyond the field. The boy is small but quick. Both of them barefoot. (Sophie and Scott, after the “robbery,” scrambled down into the ravine, where they separated, according to plan, no Bonnie and Clyde kiss when they split up. She didn’t want to kiss him. She never did kiss or even see him again after that—there was just the indirect Judas kiss of his betrayal. A much deeper sort of jilting. Betrayal doesn’t just rattle your faith in yourself, in your looks, or even in love, but also in human nature.)

  Hand in hand, she and this boy, no more than ten, whose name sh
e forgets, whose village she has led armed men into, crash into the field and run. The flowers raking her face smell mustardy. At last he stops, takes her hand in both of his and yanks downward. She crouches. His brown eyes are huge, very round for a Tibetan. He instructs her slowly and firmly, his impish, filthy face gone tragic, as if something awful has already happened. Maybe it has. And he’s gone, rustling off through the stalks, throwing up the black soles of his feet.

  She rises onto her toes, her eyes just clear of the tops of the mustard blooms. The few huge sunflowers seem to watch the village with her, like surveillance gadgets in The Prisoner. The bridge and the street of yowling dogs are hidden by the backs of houses. Her clothes, which were drying on the rocks near the outhouse, have vanished. She crouches down. The earth is cold. The seed pods smell bitter. One thing leads to another. A chainsmoking sequence of events has brought her here—errors, including her own.

  The sun rises and the walkers’ long shadows, stretching ahead of them down the gully, look gawky and starved. Hunched with cold they shamble on, except for Book, who’s forcing the pace the nearer they get to the river—its static sound channelled up to them through the gully—and Choden, beside him, holding the other front grip of Lhundup’s stretcher. She still looks rosy and fresh behind her bulky glasses, while Lhundup has gone from middle to old age in just hours, his voice high and trembling, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeply carved. Yet the sclera remain eerily clear and his blood pressure is stable. Book has told Choden he’s astonished that Lhundup has hung on—something he’d never say around a patient, even an unconscious one, who might understand—and Choden replied, “Did you know, Lewis, his name means ‘miraculous’?”

  Now he asks her, “What was the long chant…the one you did three times last night?”

  “Ah, you noticed it was the same! It’s the Diamond Sutra. What did you think?”

  Pause. “I’m not sure how I would have got through the night without it.”

  “I know,” she says quietly. “You must be concerned about your daughter.”

  He looks at her incredulously. “What…how did you…?”

  “You and Amaris were discussing it. I couldn’t help but overhear. I hope …”

  “I thought you were arguing with Norbu.”

  “We were, but overhearing other conversations isn’t hard after years at a girl’s school, then the nunnery. I think your daughter would understand this. I hope to be meeting her soon.”

  “I’ll see that you do,” he says.

  As his fear for her grows, she’s growing backward in his mind, ever younger. He helped to deliver her sixteen years eleven and a half months ago. Nika was fierce and stubborn and at times grimly funny and Book was in awe of his wife and never more deeply in love. At times she raged and called him unrepeatable things in Greek and he had accepted that, seeing her anger as a reservoir of strength for the final phase.

  As for Amaris, now, if her anger, even her wild suspicions, help get her through this, he’ll accept that too. Her sleep and their argument have rallied her. Now she and Palden take over from the monks who were holding the back grips of the stretcher. Palden is chatty again, like a bullied nerd on a field trip, sticking close to the teachers, babbling nervously. He’s recalling his days as a tour guide and asking Book about his travels. Book answers monosyllabically. At times Norbu, plodding alongside, snarls at Palden, who then briefly shuts up. Book realizes that one of the words Norbu has been repeating doesn’t just sound like “motherfucker,” it is “motherfucker.”

  Norbu seems taller, his acne fading, as if the cellblock coup and his new rank in the party have matured him, physically. But his sleepless eyes are the electrified, unreachable eyes of a fanatic. Choden has been telling Book about him and the others. Norbu, Sangye and their friends got into trouble in Lhasa after roughing up a Chinese policeman in a hip-hop dance club. (Choden mouths “hip-hop” and “club” with plosive stress and a small, dimpled smile, as if tickled by the pop in the words.) “When two more policemen came to arrest them, they roughed them up too, a little worse. The authorities won’t stand for such a loss of face. They came in force and arrested all of them, except for Norbu and Sangye, who fled. And Lhundup—Norbu’s uncle—he came with them, as a guide and guardian. The boys never had gone out of the city, you see.” After a pause filled with their shuffling, she adds, “I do keep asking, leave the guns behind, but they’ll not hear of it.”

  “They don’t have the firepower to get us out of the trouble they’ve got us in.”

  “Do weapons really get people out of trouble, Lewis?”

  “My father and I used to argue,” he says. “He thought sending in troops to kill the bad guys first would help more than sending in doctors like me to treat their victims after.”

  “But then, aren’t there more victims on both sides?”

  “I’ve seen it, yeah. Still, there’ve been times I half wished I was armed.”

  Glancing back at Norbu, she says, “He blames the Chinese for all his trouble, but I think perhaps your popular medias are as much to blame.”

  “Also too, the colonialism!” Palden blurts, and Norbu jabs him with the gun snout.

  “Blame the filmmakers,” Amaris says. “Everyone else does.”

  Choden seems delighted with this, the first thing Amaris has said in hours. Now, her smile dimming, Choden explains that Dechen and her slain husband were trying to reach their children and grandchildren, who fled over the pass near Everest two years ago to live in the Kathmandu Valley. Sonam and Lasya wanted their daughter, and the child to come, to be educated in Tibetan. The monks are novices hoping to be ordained as full monks in Dharamsala, and the nuns are trying to reach a nunnery recently founded by the Dalai Lama, where for the first time they can earn their geshe, a religious doctorate, and where Choden hopes to become a mural painter. After a pause, as if trying to decide whether to finish, she adds quickly, “The group of us got jailed after a nun’s protest in Lhasa. After release, we just fled.” Before Book can respond, she swerves away: “Lewis, when you were in Darjeeling, what were people saying about His Holiness?”

  “Actually he visited, in July, but I didn’t see him.”

  Her brow crimps up and she looks half scandalized, her widened eyes exaggerated by her lenses. “You didn’t see him!”

  “Some of my patients did. I was there because of the cholera outbreak.”

  “But even if you were sick! Do you not admire him?”

  “No, no, I was busy, night and day. I think he’d understand. My Tibetan patients said he seemed really well.” Book’s patients all seemed better for having seen him, too: the Dalai Lama as divine placebo. Now Choden’s plump, dimpled face glows in the same way his patients’ faces glowed then, and she seems content to bask in her thoughts, and that’s a relief—it’s harder and harder to listen and reply, keep the tremor out of his voice. His feet feel shredded. His stretcher arm burns. The static of the river grows louder and it makes his mouth water until fear dries it again. Sophana could be anywhere. They’re all walking faster, Pema and Dolma lurching as if in a three-legged race. Breezes smelling of life and growth flow up through the gully and now sounds ride up with the breeze: the barking of dogs, maybe men’s shouting.

  Some minutes later they round another turn and the strong-flowing river is just below them, a sparkling mirage of millions of gallons of sweet, cold water. To the left, upriver, a rope bridge droops across to a village of whitewashed huts. From behind Book, a child’s sparrowlike cry of joy and now Sonam, with his daughter riding piggyback, jounces past and down the dry wash toward the river. Sangye jogs with them, his submachinegun slung loose and swinging. Lhundup whispers something and Choden answers in a reassuring tone. Book resists the urge to run with the stretcher down this last pitch—in fact, to set the stretcher down right now and go drink and drink.

  The village dogs howl and yammer. Norbu points toward the village, calling ahead to Sangye, who turns and gives some hand signal. Book squ
ints, trying to focus on the people moving in the one, wide street that recedes from the bridge. No sign of Sophie. He spots the two Chinese at the same moment Amaris says, “Shit, those guards!” One of them stands shouting among the villagers while the other comes running back toward the bridge, vanishing behind the pier for a few seconds and then emerging on top, standing with his legs braced and a submachinegun at his hip.

  Sangye hunches but lopes on down the dry wash toward the bridge. “Everyone down!” Book says. They set the stretcher on the sand and he, Palden and Choden crouch beside it, but the others—the monks and the limping nuns, Dechen, Lasya with her hands braced around her belly, Amaris—have already pushed past, following Sonam and the child downslope toward the water. Sangye fires a burst at the guard on the bridge. The reports are tinny, toylike. The guard fires back. Norbu, standing a few feet from Book, squeezes off a louder burst. Book glances at Palden, kneeling on the far side of the stretcher, his blackened eyes darting between the river and Norbu’s unprotected back, and Book springs into motion, grunting with the strain. He’s tackling his own patient and as he takes Palden down he cradles the swathed, concussed head to protect it.

  “Lewis…please!”

  “Just stay down. He’ll kill you if you try anything.”

  “But, Lewis,” he whispers, seeming honestly perplexed, “whose side are you with?”

  “I wish you’d all stop asking me that!”

  “Norbu!” Choden calls—then words in Tibetan. Norbu has started down the dry wash, firing a few rounds with every stride, the spent shells raining. A dozen steps and he halts and kneels and sights along the snub barrel. The guard on the bridge fires again and little geysers of sand spatter up behind Sangye as he dashes over the flood flats and stops and from the beach shoots up and across at the fumbling, reloading guard. All through this, the others are rushing down to the water—they’re veering downriver, away from the gunfire, but otherwise ignoring it. Sonam and the child are on all fours in the shallows. The monks now beside them. Amaris. Upriver, Sangye stands suicidally exposed, he and the guard maybe forty metres apart, shooting and missing, splinters from the footboards and mortar of the pier flying, sand and water splattering. Norbu firing too. In the wide street beyond the bridge, small figures scurry and plunge for cover. The other guard has vanished. “Stop!” Book hollers. “Goddamn it, enough!” Now Choden leaps up and runs downslope in her swirling robes. She puts her hand on Norbu’s shoulder and he pivots, rising, to straight-arm her in the chest and spit out words and turn away, back toward the bridge. She falls backward into the slope. Book gets off Palden and runs down at Norbu, who’s loading what must be his last clip and blasting away as if in a video arcade. Book is almost on him when Sangye, on the beach, sags to his knees and flops face down. A moment later the guard on the bridge pitches backward. Book’s momentum carries him through Norbu and he and the kid tumble together, Book on top, and slide a few feet down the slope. Norbu’s baseball cap twists free. His sweat-drenched face cranes around at Book, fear and then shock in the red, steroidal eyes. Pure adrenaline. He’s incredibly strong. “Mutterfugger! Mutterfugger!” Book struggles to keep him and the gun pinned down.