Every Lost Country Read online

  “Mr. Lodi has been hunting since a boy,” Choden says. “His father taught him to shoot—his father, who fought against the Chinese? Now Mr. Lodi, he’s quite boastful for a Tibetan man, he says that he’s an excellent shot and I believe him. And yet he was one fighter alone, with a weaker gun. On the whole, Lewis, I think you did as you had to—but honestly, I don’t know quite how to think. It’s so troubling. I really don’t hate the Chinese, not even their government, and yet His Holiness has said one does have a…a duty to self-protect.”

  “I guess I don’t regret it. I just wish it hadn’t had to be me.”

  “Of course, you must.” She blows on her bare, steepled hands, as if keeping an ember alive between them. “There’s a story His Holiness tells, Lewis. About a Bodhisatva—a wandering holy man?—who finds himself in a boat with some travellers and a sort of, ah…a serial killer. The Bodhisatva recognizes this killer and he takes him aside as night falls and he whispers, ‘I know who you are, and I must ask you not to harm the other passengers.’ The man says, ‘Ah, but I mean to kill them all, one by one!’ ‘Please, you must not,’ the Bodhisatva says, but the killer won’t agree, he keeps insisting he must kill. So they debate through the whole night and the passengers are so tired, they just sleep in the boat. Dawn comes and the killer says the debate is over, and he takes out a long knife. And Lewis, what do you suppose the Bodhisatva does?”

  Book shrugs, barely. “Maybe says, ‘Kill me instead’?”

  Her kind eyes harden with a prosecutorial glitter that startles Book fully alert. She leans closer. “But then the man would just go on to kill the others! This would be a coward’s path for the Bodhisatva, just sparing himself a view of the violence! No. Here is what he does. He seizes the knife from the killer and he cuts the man’s throat from ear to ear and casts the dead body over the side. Of course, you are surprised! But Lewis, the Bodhisatva had to act. He did try everything else. So now he saves the passengers, but also he saves the killer from this deed—the awful weight it would lay on his soul. It’s compassion he acts with, no hatred of the killer, no lust for revenge. Only the pure of heart can do that. To be honest, I doubt that I could, now. I really might be too afraid.”

  “I’d be angry.”

  “You didn’t do it out of anger, I don’t think—what you did.”

  “Or compassion either.” He draws air through his chattering teeth. “And what keeps eating at me is—we helped make this mess.”

  “We? You mean this group of us?”

  “The West. Bullying China for over a century. It’s how new bullies get made.”

  She nods thoughtfully. “We call that—but you must know the term.”

  “Karma? Sophie uses the word. I still say cause and effect.”

  “The terms don’t matter, Lewis.”

  “The pilot was a woman,” he says, and he sees again the grey, rigid face through the windshield.

  “Yes, Mr. Lodi said so. He seems troubled too. Lewis, do you feel ready to walk on?”

  They climb deeper into the mountains as the grey daylight fades. Behind them in the distance some animal howls. He glances around. No one else seems to hear. He doesn’t hear it again. The wind has died. No one speaks for what seems hours and darkness condenses around them without a moon or stars.

  If only history were ever history.

  “Papa?” Sophie calls, like a child in a car’s back seat, “how much farther?”

  “Not much farther. Do you want me to …” Carry you on my shoulders, he almost says. He’s slipping. A Halloween maybe eleven years ago, Sophie on his shoulders pointing up at the moon in a haze: Look, Papa, the moon is glowing for its costume!

  Book wakes himself with a stifled cry. Amaris is there. They’re walking together in a cold mist. Her gloved hand on his forearm. “Lew?”

  “Fell asleep on my feet. Hasn’t happened since residency.”

  “Were you dreaming?”

  He shakes his head as if saying no. In fact, he’s trying to dislodge the dream, shake free of it. From the front doors of Dawson College, where he gave a talk on the ethics of borderless medicine a year before the school shooting there, his son emerges holding a long-barrelled revolver, like the one Book’s father owned. It’s Pavlos and yet it isn’t—the face and the Red Bull cap and baggy parka and sloppy jeans and wallet chain are Norbu’s. Smoke billows from the gun’s muzzle like an overdone stage effect. Screams from inside the school. As Book watches, the boy feeds the long barrel into his mouth and thumbs back the hammer. Unable to shout, his feet cemented into the pavement, Book with his whole being strains toward his son, whose voice, unimpeded by the barrel, is a clear, slow, robotic monotone: I’m sorry, Papa. I just got so hungry.

  “Yeah, so…sorry,” Amaris says faintly, as if echoing the dream.

  “What? What is it? Did I—”

  “You said back there I was right, so I should admit I was wrong, before. Starting with how you should never have crossed the border. I mean, I was filming—they might have grabbed me anyway. Plus, you felt you had no choice. Which you didn’t. Anyway, I get it now. I was wrong about you, Lew.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong about you, too,” he says softly.

  “Let’s keep this about you, okay?” The liver line between her eyes deepens. “Sorry. It’s just…I hate when people act like they know me better than me. I dumped the one shrink I ever saw after one session. They made me go when I was Sophie’s age.”

  “They wanted Sophie to go this fall,” he says, thinking, And I brought her here instead.

  “Plus, I said you put finding her above the rest of our safety. But you were right to—to put her first.”

  “Amaris, thanks, but you don’t need…. You’ve been great up here. Strong. I mean, it’s hard enough knowing how to act at sea level, on a full stomach.”

  The slow crunch of their boots, deafening in the dark.

  “Never knew it was possible,” she says, “to feel like this, and still be, you know.”

  “On your feet?”

  “Alive. I did an Ironman, six years ago. Thought that was the worst.”

  “We’re almost there,” he says. “One more night.”

  He smells her sweat, a slight, good bitterness, like cracked pepper, and a memory comes back to him like something suppressed for years: as he lay next to Amaris in the ruins of the monastery he got a stubborn erection.

  They shuffle on through the darkness and Book decides he has to ask again after Lasya and the baby, and just then Lasya stumbles, falling hard on her hip and elbow. She has twisted her body just in time to protect the baby. Sonam, Choden and Book kneel beside her and Book says that they all have to rest now, no matter what.

  Behind a broad, squared boulder the size of a suburban bungalow Tenzin and Choden build a small fire of pine twigs and yak dung. Once the kettle is on, Tenzin stands and picks up his rifle and speaks, looming over the sprawled refugees, a wiry giant, his face weirdly animated by the firelight from below. Then he turns and walks lopingly downhill into the dark. Choden explains that he means to keep watch ten minutes down the valley, so that the others can sleep. She’s very sorry, she tells Book, but she must pass along Tenzin’s request about the other gun, in case anything happens to him while he’s keeping watch: it’s in one of the saddlebags. They should start again by three or four in the morning, she says, unless the soldiers begin to catch up.

  Book nods yes, as if in a dream. A moment later he’s dozing, sitting up. Choden wakes him with a mug of smoky, lukewarm tea, stinking richly of rotten butter, and he chugs it back and gets to his feet and joins her and makes his rounds of the ward: Pema, Lasya, the baby. All holding their own. Sophie and the others are hungrily gnawing on frozen apricots. Dechen kneels beside Diki, stroking her hair, singing hoarsely, her pipe stuck in the side of her mouth. Her ancient throat sounds scraped and scabbed. The words are Tibetan, but that tune—what is it?

  This apricot like a fruit Popsicle from his childhood, worlds away.

 
There’s no wind, but out of the higher peaks a bitterly cold draught funnels downvalley. They’re all compassed close around the fire, the monks in a tight clump on the north edge, the nuns across from them. On the east side, the widow Dechen huddles with the family, a family of five now, where last night they were only three. A crisis always generates these small miracles and reparations. On the west side Sophie sleeps closest to the dying fire, Amaris behind her, then Book, who feels the night’s cold through the layers of wool and sheepskin over his spine. He’s wearing the Tibetan earflap hat. It would be cold enough tonight in a polar-proof mummy bag, inside a tent; the refugees have only their coats and a few wool blankets. Still, everyone else seems to be sleeping hard.

  “Lew, can you get a bit closer?” Amaris whispers, after a time. “I’m frozen.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He spoons with her, chastely, draping his arm across her shoulder, to Sophie’s shoulder. He doesn’t want Amaris to feel his painful erection—aching, like a nocturnal hard-on in adolescence.

  She turns to him. “Lew.”

  Her breath like tart apricots, bitter tea. In the light of the embers, the faintest down of hair at the corners of her lips, which she must usually wax.

  “I know,” he whispers.

  “Here.”

  Hard to say who kisses whom, their lips locked, forming a conduit of heat, a closed circuit between them in the deep freeze.

  He says, “We can’t.”

  “You’re right. We’re wearing gloves. And you’re in earflaps.”

  She muffles a desperate laugh as they grope.

  “No, I mean …”

  “I know, Lew.”

  He kisses her hard, in love with that small, insurgent laugh. A brave gift.

  “This won’t work,” she whispers thickly. “Here…let me turn.”

  She rolls away, pushing her backside against him.

  “Jesus,” he groans. “But…not with her there.”

  “I know. Okay.” But she’s reaching back for him. His bare hand under her parka.

  “She’d feel betrayed,” he says. “Her…Amaris …”

  “But this could be it—the end.”

  “… her hopes.”

  “We’ll stop.”

  “If it were anywhere else,” he says.

  “What anywhere? I mean, come on, Lew, what’s…there’s no …”

  “I know. If only. God, I’m dying.”

  She goes still. Her rapid, shallow breaths tapering off. He doesn’t dare move.

  “Okay, Lew. You’re right.”

  What do you mean I’m right? he wants to howl.

  “Selfish of me,” she whispers. “It’s my specialty.”

  “No. I feel just the same, Amaris. But …”

  “I can tell.”

  “No, I mean it,” he says.

  “I know you do.”

  “And you’re not,” he whispers, “selfish.”

  “I will be again, soon. Can’t wait.”

  He pushes closer and she pushes back and they lie still, his arm again draped over her shoulder, reaching to Sophie’s shoulder, and for a moment Sophie seems to be lying too still—then her arm flutters slightly and her breathing resumes its deep rhythm. Against Amaris’s small body his erection won’t subside, he’s aching with lonely desire and it’s a struggle not to move against her and he has no idea how he’ll ever find sleep, but then he wakes in the same position and his body is warm and calm against hers and his spine is icy cold and the night has cleared and opened: the Milky Way like a Silk Road flowing across the dark.

  When he wakes again, the stars are dying, Choden hunkered over the fire, stirring it with a pine twig, the glowing coals mirrored in her glasses. Her bare hands tremble. Tenzin’s tiny binoculars now hang around her neck, and that’s odd—shouldn’t Tenzin have them himself? Book doesn’t move and the nun doesn’t glance over, yet after a moment, still watching the coals, she says, “I’m afraid we’ll have to depart quite soon, Lewis. The soldiers’ flashlights seem to be coming up the valley.”

  What a Wonderful World: that’s what Dechen was singing, with Tibetan words.

  In the ice blue atrium of the cave, Lawson sits out the storm, hearing his quick pulse thudding inside his skull and seemingly outside it, around him, dully amplified by the cave walls. With his flashlight he examines Albert Murloe: a wilted mummy in a heavy Shetland turtleneck, khaki wool trousers, thick wool socks spackled with ice crystals and grains of gravel. No boots. He stepped out of his boots somewhere between the top of the wall and the cave, Lawson decides. Near the top of Everest, decades of extreme solar radiation bleached George Mallory’s exposed shoulders to white marble, but here in this freezer, Murloe’s face has darkened like a bog man’s—or is Lawson seeing the residue of the walnut juice the man used to dye his skin? He’s lying on his side, balled up as if he’s still cold, his knees tucked high, elbows pressed to his ribs, bare, shrivelled fists scrunched in front of his face like a boxer. The gutted eye sockets stare toward the mouth of the cave, which is fanged with large icicles.

  The shock of finding the body has defibrillated Lawson’s brain—it seems to function now and he knows, he thinks he knows, that this moment is real, though he keeps feeling himself lapsing back into those trippy regions on the edge of sleep. The summit can’t be far. He and Murloe must be just below it. Murloe may well have made the summit, though on the whole it’s more likely that he got this far and fell just short. He’d have been hypothermic, his feet dead as stumps. Probably caught in a bad squall. Not that Lawson minds if Murloe got up there first. He no longer sees him and himself as truly separate and is touched by the loneliness of his death—Murloe’s death. Lawson isn’t dying. But he needs to nap. Just an hour or two. Wait out the worst. The summit can’t be far and he means to get up there, even if going back down into the world to claim credit, later, seems impossible. The fresh blame. The death, or deaths. He tries radioing Jake. No response—static—the faint, pan-frying crackle of the solar wind. He should crawl back outside and try again, in a few minutes, and he will, he will. But first. (First what…?) Amaris and Book and Sophie waving from the distance far down there in Tibet, taunting him, maybe, for needing rest.

  Each time he half wakes beside Murloe his instinct is to sit up and turn on the flashlight and check for life signs, but he feels too drowsy, heavy—his limbs glowing with a gentle warmth, a lush numbness, as if he’s drunk half a dozen hot buttered rums—and he slips back under, curled up, almost spooning with the corpse. It’s okay. He’s not scared. Jenn was scared sleeping with the three smaller toes on his right foot that turned black from frostbite after Mount Logan—they had to wait until the flesh finished dying so the surgeons would know how much to cut off. Perfectly normal, they explained. There were maggots at work, and a bit of a smell, though not as much of a smell as you might think. Still, he guesses things like that must strain a marriage.

  He wakes to a sound in the cave mouth and sits up, surprisingly refreshed. Grey daylight. A pair of unblinking yellow eyes the size of marbles peer in between the icicles. He has seen jaegers high in these mountains, though never much above 6,000 metres, and never close up. The bird’s auburn feathers are iced. It stamps its black feet like a man in snowy boots preparing to enter a house. Gorak, that was the Sherpa word. He guesses it has come for his eyes now. He reaches with his mittened hand and the bird makes a short, rattling caw and retreats, puffing out its feathers, displaying great, totemic wings.

  No, it’s okay. Don’t be scared. Don’t go.

  He reaches farther, to the mouth of the cave.

  Please.

  There’s an aerial thumping, a flash of feathers, and the bird is gone, out of view.

  Beyond the cave mouth, the snow has all but stopped. Lawson’s strong heart is beating almost normally, as at sea level. In a calm trance he abandons the handset radio, the flashlight, his backpack containing the camera and his sponsor’s flag. It’s clear to him now that these things are irrel
evant. Clear that what’s irrelevant is unreal. He drags Murloe’s mummy out through the cave mouth into the daylight and the Shetland sweater seems to hook on something on the cave floor. He pulls gently and it comes free. How little Murloe weighs. Lawson’s tired arms register no strain as he hefts the husk and carries it back up the side of the notch onto the ridge. Like carrying a small child. Even a baby. Zero gravity. The peak can’t be far. Let me help now. Couldn’t help the dead baby or Clyde or that other dying climber with his face stillborn, gentian blue. Most ways of loving are lonely, but there are other ways. He has seen them. Sensed them. You wanted to get what you didn’t give. There is still time. Still overcast but the snow has stopped and the wind is calmer and the ceiling barely half a pitch above. Clouds lifting to reveal two sides of the pyramid, all but converging. His view downward to either side exploding—lesser peaks, range on range under fresh-fallen snow, jutting up through lower tiers of cloud like a polar archipelago. Sun through the haze like a moon. Murloe’s husk weighs something after all. Lawson’s arms tremble and he kneels and hefts the mummy over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

  They near the shrouded peak and the last clouds back away. Lawson climbs with small steps, panting, inhaling odours of lanolin and woodsmoke from the Shetland wool Velcroed to his stubble. The summit pyramid is weirdly perfect, as if drawn with a combination square. A template of a summit. All others, botched replicas!

  We’re almost there.

  Never realized I was this close, Murloe replies, his voice muffled from behind Lawson’s back. The enunciation is upper-class Yankee, the tone clipped but affable. He sounds a bit like a Kennedy.

  So there was a storm? Lawson asks.

  There certainly was a storm. I wasn’t in my proper mind by then. Ought to have turned back.

  That’s not our style, though, is it, says Lawson.

  Well, I suppose it isn’t.

  We’ll get there together. I think we’re there.

  The slope levels out and falls away in all four directions. It’s dead calm. They can go no higher. Over the far side of the mountain, the Himalayas recede, wave on wave like ocean swells in a spindrift of lower cloud. The vertigo here is thrilling. From here you could howl in God’s face.