Every Lost Country Page 27

  No shots have been fired for several minutes. He asks Choden for the delicate binoculars. The eyepieces freeze the skin around his eyes. As he trains the lenses on the north side of the valley, the Chinese resume firing and after a few seconds he finds Tenzin—puny at this range—hunched and loping between boulders, trying to move west up the valley. As he runs, he hits a snowdrift and vanishes in a spray of powder and re-emerges covered with snow, as if he’s run through a plaster wall. He keeps going but he gets bogged down in deeper stuff and takes cover behind another rock.

  Book sweeps the good lenses down the slope and finds the Chinese pinned down on the valley floor. Some of them are crouched behind boulders, firing upward toward Tenzin. They’re in desert camouflage gear, helmets, heavy vests—down vests or Kevlar—and they wear backpacks. Behind one boulder several men crouch, two firing over the top, another holding something to the side of his face, probably a radio phone, while a kneeling medic works on a man who lies on his side on the ground—the only visible casualty. Yet something’s wrong. Book counts only a dozen, maybe fifteen men. He scans around. Behind another rock he finds a blurred heap of camouflaged objects and he sucks in a breath—a pile of bodies?—then brings them into focus: the backpacks of the missing men.

  Lowering the binoculars, he scans upvalley: movement in the nearer distance. He seats the eyepieces back in place: about thirty men, their submachineguns held across their chests, coming up the trail at a forced march. Jets of breath fusing, dissolving above them.

  “We have to go right now.”

  Now he notices one of the soldiers in the middle of the group—a bandage crossing his face diagonally, covering an ear and an eye, vanishing into a helmet that’s too big for him. He’s visibly struggling, weaving. “My God,” Book whispers. “It’s Palden.” There’s a small detonation of gravel to the left of the soldiers. Seconds later, the crump of a rifle. Tenzin wasn’t lying about his aim. He must be half a mile from the soldiers and has barely missed. The men all duck and slow down and then, still hunched over, speed up again.

  “Did you say Palden Jangbu?” Choden asks.

  Book lowers the binoculars, shaking his head as if to say no, but saying, “Yes.”

  “I thought this might happen,” Choden says—Sophie listening from the snow, Amaris approaching. “They’d much prefer to have Tibetan troops take us, if possible, you see.”

  Amaris says sharply, “Better optics, sure.”

  “They might send him ahead,” Choden adds, “to catch us up. They’ve done such things before. Him or other Tibetans, if they’ve any.”

  A sound comes like the splitting crash of the rifle but painfully sustained and growing louder so that the fugitives, strewn in the snow, flatten themselves, some covering their ears. A silver, spurlike object flies up the valley at the altitude of the fugitives and directly toward them, though still a few miles off. A jet fighter. It banks in a quick, stiff manner, like a radio-controlled toy, rocketing toward the north side of the valley. In profile it’s much larger than expected. On its tail, the blur of a red star. Two missiles streak from its wings, trailing comet tails of pillowy white smoke, then plunge into the mountainside below the rock where Tenzin was hiding. There’s a piercing flash and a ballooning fireball. A creosote cloud scudding away. The jet veers back upvalley, toward the fugitives. Book crouches beside Sophie and sets a hand on her shoulder to keep her down. He glances back, finds Amaris on her knees beside Diki, her arm around the crying child’s shoulders, speaking softly to her. “Don’t worry!” he yells, but the clap of the explosion buries his words. The jet zips over them, shredding into the low clouds and then, half a minute later, blowing back into view much higher above, skimming in the opposite direction down the valley. In seconds it’s a glittering speck in the open skies to the northeast.

  A pitted crater of scorched snow and gravel where Tenzin was before. Now a frothing surf seems to break downward over that hole: the avalanche, small but sufficient, blitzes on down the mountainside, past the snowline, into the valley bottom, its long, mounting rumble now audible—but the momentum of those tons of snow exhausts itself far short of the pinned-down soldiers, who are already beginning to stand up and edge out from behind the rocks where they were crouching.

  “We set out now,” Choden calls. Sonam is driving the bawling yak up the snowy valley, whacking its haunches with a switch of pine. Book needs both arms to haul Sophie upright. “Go on,” he tells her, pointing up the trail, and she says, “What do you mean, what are you doing—let’s go!” and he growls at her, “Give me a second here,” and she says, “Why?” and he says, “Hurry up!” and she cries, “You are not staying back here like some hero in 300 !” and he says, “No, I promise you—go on,” and she, “Only when you do!”

  He gives up, shakes his head, thumbs off the safety catch. “Cover your ears,” he tells her, and squeezes off a burst, flinching as the gun bucks in his freezing hands, shooting into the clouds. He lifts the binoculars to his eyes. It was more of a burst than he intended but it has the intended effect: as the men hear the shots, the leader lifts his hand and the men all freeze and drop to one knee, their helmets tucked down.

  He pushes Sophie ahead and starts after her. “Go, go on!”

  “I’m trying.”

  Light snowfall starting. Might give them a little cover, and the pursuing soldiers seem rigged out for speed, not a winter storm—they’ve left their heavier gear behind in that pile of backpacks. He pauses to let Sophie get ahead. Choden lags back to join him and now in silence she and Book plod along. Choden never looks behind, Book looks back all the time: the snow picking up, screening their retreat like a creeping barrage, starting to fill in the trail they’re breaking for the soldiers. There’s still hope. Again Dolma strays off-trail and sags to a praying position and Book and Choden start toward her, but she picks herself up, muttering, dusting herself off and reeling onward, her white sneakers lost in the snow.

  Choden’s small red sneakers flash clearly as she pads along.

  “Your feet all right?” he asks. “Can you feel them?”

  “All too well, Lewis. Thank you.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “She isn’t making much sense, but I believe she means she won’t be captured. She won’t go back to the jail in Lhasa, or a prison. Come to think of it, Lewis, neither will I.”

  Her voice is unchanged—mellow, measured—but her cheeks have lost their incandescence and the lively dimples have vanished. She doesn’t look at him as she speaks: “The jail where I met you, that was different. Officer Zhao said that Lasya and I wouldn’t be harmed—I think he sensed my feeling—and he kept to his word. At the jail in Lhasa, they weren’t like that. One said to me they meant to prove that a nun’s training couldn’t prevent us from calling out in pain, and so they did. They did prove it. They hit us with tubes of rubber filled with sand. It’s surprising how good a weapon that is. Then they changed to a, another, uh…the electronic batons.” She says it like battens. “I believe you call them cow prods. I do hope they aren’t used on cows anymore. The guards, men and women, they used them in quite a few ways. They thought I learned to speak English so as to contact the foreign medias, or to explain our story to tourists from the West. It’s partly true, for sure, but…it angered them some deeper way that we’re nuns, I think…never making connections with men …”

  He shakes his head, as if surprised—as if he hasn’t heard similar tales many times before.

  “They don’t do such acts with their own persons, though. They use the prods.”

  “I thought you meant that.”

  “So, Dolma won’t hear of being captured again.”

  “I’m really sorry, Choden.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she tells him.

  A shot rings out in the distance, beyond the snow cloud they’re walking in. After some moments, a second, confirming shot. The piercing pitch is unmistakable. It’s Tenzin. The fugitives slow down, gape at each other and squint
around them, as if their guardian, back from the dead, will emerge out of the snows at any time.

  Minutes later the jet fighter howls back up the valley.

  Amaris and Sophie, with Lasya and the baby between them, glance back as the sound of the fighter mounts. Nothing to see beyond the snow’s interference. Everything is white or grey except for the plum-red Buddhist robes. Now all around the party, a yellow flash, like sheet lightning somewhere in the clouds. Seconds later, the air strike’s blast shatters the valley and leaves Amaris’s ears thrumming. This time, she numbly assumes, they got him.

  “Keep moving!” Lew yells and she can see him now, he and Choden nearing, herding the group in front of them. Life assigns such unthinkable scripts: Lew Book, humanitarian doctor, swaying along with a machinegun hung over his shoulder like the bloodied, macho hero of an action flick. It doesn’t make him more attractive—she goes for rogues, not Rambos, and his skin is mottled with soot and dirt and blood, his green eyes flashing in the dark face with a cornered urgency—yet last night she wanted him as fiercely as she ever wanted a man. She still does. He meets her stare and she hears herself blurt at him, who knows why, “Maybe you could help break the trail a bit now?” The yak is leading, they’d be helpless without it, but the first few who follow—Sonam, carrying the child; the clumped trio of monks; the tiny widow—are still doing more to trample a path than Lew and Choden. Then Amaris sees how the glow in Choden’s cheeks has burned out, how there’s a fog on her thick glasses that must leave her almost blind but she’s doing nothing to clear them.

  Lew doesn’t answer Amaris. His brow is knotted—he’s either trying to figure out the meaning of her simple phrase or he’s angry about it.

  “He wants to be at the back,” Sophie says, stating the obvious, “with the gun.”

  “I know, forget it. Don’t listen to me.”

  The wind rising, throwing the dry, phoney-looking snow into their faces and eyes—burning soapflakes. Amaris draws the hood of her warm parka on over her toque while the wind keeps razoring through her tights. She hears Lew speaking to Choden and now Choden shouts hard into the wind so that her voice sounds stressed and much older. Sonam, without looking back, hollers a reply and slaps the yak with the switch. It hurries for a few steps, lowing mournfully, then its hindquarters buckle and it’s kneeling on the trail, gusts of breath chuffing back between its horns. Sonam swings Diki down off his shoulders and lifts the switch and torques his arm far back, pausing with obvious reluctance before each blow. At each blow, Sophie cringes. “Don’t!” she cries. Diki makes throbbing wails, Dechen shakes her prayer wheel instead of spinning it and howls what must be curses at the enveloping cloud and the horizontal snow, Dolma staggers, flaps her mittens in front of her closed eyes, as if the stinging flakes are a hail of hornets. The monks brace themselves around the yak’s slumped hindquarters like men trying to push a van out of a snowbank. Amaris can foresee the group going to pieces; it terrifies her and snaps her alert.

  “Unload it—him!” she calls, then turns around to see Choden and Lew just as they pass her and Sophie on either side. “Lew, Choden! Dump the blankets and the water and everything—we just have to go for it.”

  “Right,” Lew says, and Choden says, “We will,” and calls out to Sonam as she and Lew stride forward. Sonam drops the switch and grapples with the panniers. Lew wades through the drifting, knee-deep snow beside the yak and disappears behind its head. For a moment she wonders if there’s something in his medical kit he can use on the animal—would an EpiPen help now, adrenaline for an hour or two? She leaves Lasya with Sophie and gets around the shrieking Dechen, stepping left off the narrow trail so she can see Lew. Icy flakes cut into her eyes like ground glass. The monks readying for another push, two of the three turned away from the yak, squatting low with their backs braced to its haunches. Lew is feeding it something. The long, jaundiced tongue unscrolls. Sonam gives a shout and the young monks grunt in chorus. The yak’s hindquarters lift and instantly it trots forward and the two backward-facing monks fall seat first in the snow. They glance at each other, startled, and for the span of a few breaths they laugh silently.

  Sonam hands out paper packets to the fugitives, one each, bowing his crumpled face and repeating something as he sets the packets firmly in their hands. Cookies of some kind. He won’t meet anyone’s eyes, as if ashamed to be giving so little. Amaris nods thanks, though she can’t think of swallowing anything now except water. They gimp back into motion, stepping over the strewn blankets and panniers and frozen water skins, even Lew’s medical kit, its mouth gawped open like something dead; she guesses he has stowed whatever he can carry in his pockets.

  As he heads for the back of the line again, he stops to check on Lasya and there’s a quick sign-language exchange, then Sophie asks him, “What did you give Zapa?”

  “I thought crackers might help him—the salt. He loved the salt.”

  “I have a few more saved,” the girl says.

  “Keep them.”

  “But If Zapa needs them …”

  His eyes are a plexus of burst blood vessels but now, at the corners, they crinkle slightly and Amaris senses he’s touched and amused by how the girl respectfully keeps using the name Zapa “Okay, love.”

  “Lew—should we help Dolma instead, for a bit?”

  “No, she won’t let anyone touch her,” he says, and he’s gone, and Amaris realizes he has given her arm a firm squeeze.

  “You save any food?” Sophie asks Amaris, her voice like a small child’s.

  “A few crackers and a piece of that meat. But I’m not giving them to the yak.” In fact, she’s been saving the food for Sophie and Diki.

  “I was saving mine for him,” Sophie says, nodding back toward her father.

  When Amaris looks again at her watch, a half-hour has passed. She’s too weak to warn Lasya, beside her, and Sophie, on the farther side, that she has to stop. It doesn’t matter—as she stops, so do they. No one alone has the strength to keep the others going, but any one of them can stop them all. Amaris folds over as her stomach convulses. She brings up nothing, not even spit. She puts a little snow into her mouth and they shamble on, side by side, a grotesque chorus line. She’s too tired to look back in fear, too tired even to look up, but now she does look up and all of them, even the hulking, black-haired yak, are merging into the blizzard. The florid red of the Buddhist over-robes has dulled to a faint fax of the original, like Choden’s dimmed face. When everything is snuffed to versions of grey, she guesses, it’ll be over.

  She finds herself gaping at Sophie. “You hear that?”

  The girl nods from inside her hood, her face ghastly white from the cold, purple around the eyes. The Tibetans jabber in low, emphatic tones. They’ve heard it, too—another distant shot, as if Tenzin’s ghost is still covering them, shadowing them up the valley. Silence falls, except for the wind, and she knows they’re all listening for another shot, but instead, over the storm’s white noise, they hear their pursuers—a faint exchange of voices, an order, a shouted reply. Maybe a soldier is lost in the snow. Maybe Palden. It’s a search! (Maybe we should help, Amaris thinks. This is all a misunderstanding.) She’s aware, in thin fits of clarity, that her mind is working bizarrely again. Lasya looks hugely pregnant with the baby under her layers and for a second Amaris is perplexed, recalling the birth. There’s a faint mewing and Lasya adjusts her burden and the mewing ends. She’s nursing as she walks. They straggle onward. Amaris looks back: Choden steering Dolma from behind, the two nuns’ robes nearly white now. If they were ten metres farther back, they’d be invisible. She can barely pick out Lew, a few steps behind Choden, his head down against the pelting snow. Actually, there’s somebody else behind him, a shadow in the storm, which is odd—who could be back there? One of their party must have fallen back, taken over as rearguard. She looks ahead, does a body count, but the primary school math defeats her, she has to start from scratch.

  Wait a minute.

  She spins arou
nd, jostling Lasya, and yells “Lew!” He looks up, his face dark, eyes probing, then pivots to face behind him. For a moment nothing happens—that following shadow closing in on him—then there’s a flare of pink light like a car’s tail lights flashing in fog, and the harsh stammer of a machine gun.

  “Papa!”

  “Go on, go on!” he shouts, still turned away. His voice has a choked, chesty sound. He’s stumbling toward them, his upper body twisted around to keep the gun aimed behind. A dark shape lies back there on the trail. Choden pushing, shoving Dolma ahead of her. Lasya bolts clear of the stunned Amaris and Sophie, and now they turn and follow her up the trail; she seems to be hugging herself with cold as she braces the baby and tries to run, passing her husband, who grips a handful of the braids that hang over the back of her coat to keep her from rushing into the drifts, wading past Zapa. He murmurs to her, puts his brow to her temple, an arm around her waist, and they’re walking. One of the monks has Diki on his back. Amaris feels her heart rate maxing, the grade worsening, now of all times, you can do it you can do it she chants in her mind, that cliched, can-do mantra that has been the rhythm track of her existence since film school, self-coaching, cajoling her on. It’s why she understood Wade without ever really liking him. She gets him even better now.

  She and Sophie lean into the slope and the gale and for a long time who knows if there’s anyone ahead or in back of them or anything besides this killing climb and this ice-barbed wind that feels as bitterly personal as it’s impersonal. Fuck off fuck off fuck off——her other mantra. Then it seems she must be dreaming. The climb has grown less difficult. Finally she twigs: the headwind has died and the trail has flattened out. Sonam’s face turns, his whiskers a frozen waterfall from nostrils to chin, his eyes flared open, and he’s pointing feverishly and can’t restrain a cry, though he looks as if he knows he should. Something off to the right of their trail—an igloo with a row of rags above it crusted with ice like socks and dishcloths hung out on a line. She stares dumbly, then sees: it’s a snow-buried cairn, lines of frozen prayer flags. They’ve reached the high pass on the flank of Kyatruk. The border.