Every Lost Country Read online

  “We reach the border”—he puffs forcibly from the side of his mouth—“and there we find a Chinese refugee woman ready with a video camera? This is too much of a, a …”

  “Coincidence,” she says quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not a coincidence—I mean, yes, it’s a coincidence! I was shooting the climb. It’s a climbing party. Your men saw us up at the border, maybe ten days ago, just after we arrived. Weren’t you there?” (She knows he was. She never forgets a face.) “You must have seen me too.”

  “I took careful note.”

  “I need water. And I need to pee.” He isn’t about to offer her a smoke. A stone’s throw behind him the Tibetans, cross-legged in a circle on the ground, are passing around the water pots. The moon is an interrogator’s lamp, though it’s about to set.

  He says, “Your presence was fine timing for the Tibet Splittists’ behalf! May is the main climbing season in the Himalaya, not in September.”

  “But it’s the cheap season—Wade said that—September.”

  “And in the Khiong Pass, nobody climbs in any month. Who is this Wade?”

  “He’s leader of the expedition. I think you must—”

  “He is Tibetan, this leader?”

  “Who—Wade?”

  “Or a foreign sympathizer, I think!” the man says, bunching forward over his knees.

  She feels herself smile at the thought. Then, God help her, she begins chuckling. Tibetan faces, guzzling water, pivot toward her. Book is hunched over the bleeding man in a nimbus of blue light—a spooky blue, like the glow of a soul leaving the body—but suddenly she’s helpless, delirious with fatigue and disbelief. Wade, a sympathizer! A Tibetan! The officer in his earflaps and horn-rims watches her, appalled. Her lapse is some grave indiscretion.

  “Wade Lawson,” she gets out, pulling herself together, “he’s just a…he’s a mountain climber. He just wanted a mountain no one had climbed.”

  “Then why you not climbing it!” the man cries, his English slipping now. “Why all waiting on the border! You, and a physician, and the Sherpas to help out!”

  “We came down from Camp One,” she says. “We saw what was happening and we came down.”

  “From up high? This is not likely. None of this is likely. I think you must be some spy and sympathizer with the Splittists and Dalai Lama! There are so many of you now.”

  “Look, this is—you have this so wrong! If you think I drive around at home in a VW van with a Free Tibet sticker on the tail …” Like my adoptive parents, she thinks.

  “All of you would like to infame the Chinese government and the people! And many of you want to make motion pictures, like you!”

  “Where’s my Canon?” she says. “My camera?”

  “We have confiscated it.”

  “It had better be safe.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Amaris McRae,” she enunciates, as if repeating herself to a defective voice-recognition system. “The last name is Scottish—my father is Scottish-Canadian. My mother is Jewish. Oh my God! Look, get on the phone, get on the Internet. You must have that at your base. You can get all the information you want on me.”

  “Maybe false information!”

  “Thousands of hits’ worth? Plus, I have a website!” A link to the site, www.amarisfilm.com, blips across her mind’s eye. Absurd. This is all absurd—she’s bragging about her web presence to a tinpot interrogator who’s looking smaller and smaller on his toadstool of a stone, his voice getting ever higher, as if he’s sublimating away through his cigarette. He is armed, and there may be danger here, but not for her and Book. She feels for the Tibetans but can’t help feeling relieved for herself—she’s a citizen of a First World democracy, has a solid presence in that powerful world, and it’s absurd to be afraid.

  Scowling, he says, “I can’t understand this, ‘hits’?”

  “You can’t just go around abducting people,” she says. “I’m a citizen of Canada. So is Dr. Book. There are international laws…and I never even crossed the border up there!”

  The truth of the phrase, the unfairness of her predicament.

  “You carry no passports,” he says.

  “When will we get to a phone?”

  “And the laws here are Chinese.”

  “What about when the media gets onto this? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen when—”

  “From a rich country, you think, from North America, you are special!” Again he tries to sit highest, but Amaris is no longer slouching. In fact, she’s sitting as tall as she can. Abruptly he gets to his feet and fillips his cigarette into the river. The eastern skyline has sliced the moon into semi-eclipse.

  “Let me have my camera back,” she says, “and there won’t be any trouble. People will see…I mean…the media will show that you’re giving me the freedom to …”

  His face stops her. His right hand isn’t by his holster but, almost worse, behind his back, as if he’s trying to keep from reaching for his gun. He no longer seems laughable. A pulse of fear demotes her to childhood; she’s being intimidated by the birth father she never met, who may, she knows, have questioned prisoners, among other things, for the Americans in Vietnam.

  “We march again now,” the officer says, and adds some brusque, conclusive phrase in Chinese.

  The moon is gone but new light is broaching from the east. Five a.m. by her watch. She drags along in a trance of exhaustion. Along the valley walls, life finally appears, dwarf pines and a few thatches of low, spindly trees with yellow leaves. They pass a rock pile streamered with strings of ancient-looking prayer flags—rags of coloured fabric meant to spread the hymns of peace inscribed on them, Sophie has told her; like a secret broadcast via the winds. Nice idea. The winds, she sees, eventually tear them to shreds.

  She walks behind Book, both of them just off the trail where the lame nun hobbles with the older nun, and the wounded man, his eyes shut in a wince, jounces on a stretcher the Chinese must have brought up with them. The Tibetans and Book and Amaris keep trading places around the stretcher. Amaris glares frankly at the lively soldier and his giant comrade, who don’t offer to take a turn, though the giant does keep glancing over ruefully, as if he’s sympathetic and might be willing. The lively one, a Tibetan (she overheard him and Book talking before), keeps nattering at Book, who says little in reply. There’s something wrong with Book’s feet. Instead of walking with a normal roll, heel to toe, he plants his boots flat on the ground in a stilted movie-monster plod. Old leather hiking boots, scuffed uppers, eroded heels. She’s too tired to ask what’s wrong. It’s a myth that suffering makes you more compassionate and helpful; past a certain point, it just confines you to the small, private country of your pain.

  To either side the mountains fall away and the valley widens as it curves east, opening onto a desert, low knolls and dunes and sprawling flats and the glacial river carving down into a ravine and out of sight. Closer, where the valley and desert meet, there’s a low cinderblock hut, like a bunker from some forgotten war—the Chinese base, finally, it must be, though it looks too cramped for everyone to stop and rest in, even if this light shows clearly how small the refugee band is: the two nuns, the grey-haired father and his little daughter, the wounded man, the two young guys who look like extras from The Wire, four young monks and a tiny old woman—a widow since only last night. Amaris doesn’t include herself and Book in the roll call. As if they can’t possibly be present. As if she’s watching all this through a lens.

  As they near the hut, the buzzing ATVs, one with the officer standing on the back, scutter ahead and park beside two military trucks. A red sun blisters out of the horizon and the grey concrete of the hut turns to adobe and the desert goes maroon, like the surface of Mars. The head border guard confers with the officer while the other guards file into the hut. The officer, pointing at his wrist, waves off some suggestion. The guard leader salutes, turns, walks inside after his men. Now the Tibetan soldier jogs pa
st Amaris, and as he heads for the parked trucks, it hits her with a wallop—they aren’t stopping here, they’re going farther. “Lew!” she begins. His back is turned, shoulders slumped under the grey poncho of the blanket, his boots slung around his neck by the laces. He’s barefoot in the cold gravel, the hems of his blue jeans turned up as if to keep them off his heels, where the skin is flayed and seeping. The line of captives starts to move. The nearest truck—a troop carrier, its box roofed in with canvas, open at the back—gives a throat-clearing sound as it starts. Surely Book will demand some kind of medical stop before they go on. He’s a doctor, they’ll have to listen. But he squats and grips one pole of the stretcher and stands and shuffles ahead, shoeless and caped in his blanket like a street person, as if he’s too cowed or tired to speak up. The second truck shudders and roars. The river is fifty metres off, behind the hut, and there she spots what she’s looking for, a concrete outhouse nestled in a thicket of small trees. She has to go before getting into that truck. The thought of it slamming over ruts and potholes for who knows how long with her bladder like this…and how can she be so thirsty and her bladder so full?

  A soldier slaps down the tailgate of the first truck. Book and the teenager in the baseball cap crawl up and pull the stretchered man inside, others pushing from the back. Now soldiers start driving or hauling prisoners aboard, though the two nuns and the man with the daughter remain by the tailgate, arguing with a soldier who has a cruelly handsome, hard-angled face, a brushcut hairline starting not an inch above his eyebrows. The father speaks angrily and turns and squats his daughter down and lifts her skirts and the soldier grabs the girl’s braids and tugs her upright, then unslings his rifle and holds it across his chest, jutting his face into the father’s face as if about to butt him. The girl howling. This is outrageous; Amaris looks for the Chinese officer. He’s emerging from behind the hut, smoking, his walk still graceful, his face deathly pale. She walks toward him, trembling. He raises his open hand and jabs a finger at the trucks. “Go back now!”

  On one of his dusty boots, droplets gleam in the sloping light.

  “I need to go too,” she says. “We all do. Please! And your men are acting—”

  “We are going, just now.”

  “No, I mean we need to go.”

  He looks fiercely baffled.

  “The toilet,” she says.

  “Get aboard the truck now! There is no time!”

  “The child has to pee too. So does the nun.”

  “It isn’t far.”

  He clasps her left arm and, like someone leading in a Latin dance, pivots her cleanly so she is facing the trucks, as he is. The smoke of his cigarette in her eyes. As he walks her toward the trucks, his clutch is firm but doesn’t hurt; he has chosen not to hurt her, or she’s hurting too much elsewhere to notice. Most of the Tibetans are aboard now, though the nuns are still outside arguing with the handsome, hard-faced soldier, who smacks his rifle butt on the lowered tailgate and makes a gargoyle face at them. Amaris is not climbing up there. She shivers. Cold sweat prickles from her pores. She jerks her arm free and in one motion peels her tights and her panties down and squats in the gravel. Her parka covers her, mostly. The officer snaps something in Chinese, then, “What are you doing!”

  She won’t look up. She stares at his small, sprinkled boots and the gravel around them. Each tiny stone and its shadow. Her thighs shake. Tears squeeze into her eyes. She can’t pee. There’s more commotion around the back of the truck, the older nun ignoring the shouting soldier as she helps her wounded friend to squat down, bracing her from behind like a midwife. From under the young nun’s robes, urine flows and pools, smoking in the cold. The kid in the baseball cap and parka—unzipped, his necklaces dangling—slides off the open tailgate and stands, back turned, by the trembling tailpipe. His stream is audible. The soldier starts toward him but now the Tibetan father is climbing out of the truck, half blocking the soldier, who shoves him and barks words. The father ignores him and lifts his daughter down. Into the back of the truck the soldier yells; the Chinese giant, his face doleful and scared, ducks and crawls out to help him. It’s too late—the other teenager and three of the monks clamber out after the giant, followed by a third soldier, blushing and very young, who doesn’t seem to scold the monks but to plead and reason with them. He eyes Amaris shyly. The eyes of the monks deftly avoid her. The officer stalks toward the truck, hesitates, a hand twitching to his holster and then retreating behind him so that his fist is glued to the small of his back. The truck goes on emptying. The fourth monk helps the old widow down. Only Book and the wounded man are still in there, out of sight. Everywhere urine flows triumphantly. Those fountain sounds, the feel of rebellious, communal release, loosen her at last, and with searing relief, as if her exhaustion and fear and loneliness are draining away too, she lets go.

  Wade Lawson is not twenty minutes up the switchback trail to Camp One when he spots a figure descending toward him and Shiva. He stops, lifts his sunglasses, lowers them again. Zeph, maybe? Jake? Surely not Tashi. Tash wouldn’t disobey him. Nor would Zeph, he tells himself—though Zeph might just forget.

  “Shiv, can you see who that is?”

  He turns to check on the tiny porter, dwarfed in Book’s parka, hunched and huffing under a colossal pack. In a panting voice the man says, “Mr. Lawson” (Larson, it comes out), “I think it is Jake. Or else, it is Zeph. Or, perhaps, Tashi Sherpa.”

  Lawson closes his eyes, tries to get his wind. His own pack is overloaded too—he doesn’t want to make another run down to base camp, if possible—and he slept maybe an hour last night. Still, starting up this trail, getting out of earshot of the jangling sat-phones, he felt almost cheerful. Base camp was like Namche Bazaar on a festival day, with Ming and Jigme and the refugees milling around, cooking and eating, eating, eating, preparing to set out. As Lawson made his escape, he savoured the quiet that grew around him and the warm, dorsal embrace of his backpack, which always seems to complete him, a second, solidifying torso, a good burden firming him to the earth…. Now he watches that other climber’s zipping descent of the switchbacks. It is Zeph. Lawson’s dream is dissolving. He sweeps his gaze down the glacier. No sign of the Chinese returning with Amaris and his doctor, though he counts on that happening with all his will—they have to return, by afternoon, so Amaris, if she’s not too exhausted, can come up to Camp One tomorrow and still climb with him and make the film.

  Speaking with Sophie’s mother at six this morning was the worst. She’d been trying to get through, she said, for two hours. Lawson was carefully shaving, sipping black coffee, mentally jotting a list of stuff for Shiva to porter up to Camp One, when Kal signalled him. Who? he mouthed. “Mrs. Book!” Kal basically shouted, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece. Lawson had been on and off the phones for a couple of hours already. News services, mostly. He’d hoped to avoid Sophie’s mother. He’d figured that she and Kal had nailed down a rapport last night, so she’d be happy to speak only with Kal now—and, of course, with her daughter. He set down his personal mirror and razor and took the receiver and smothered the mouthpiece. “Tell her I’ll go get Sophie for her. I’ll go wake her up now.”

  “I said I would do so,” Kal whispered, now that whispering was irrelevant—he looked rattled, as if wakened from a climber’s nightmare—“but she says, for now please let the girl sleep.”

  “Let her sleep and she’ll sleep till eleven. And she’ll need to spell you off soon.”

  “Her mother says she’ll call back in two hours. She says, now she must talk to you.”

  “Is this Mrs. Book?” Lawson deepened his thinning voice, trying to sound calm.

  “Dr. Nika Stefakis,” she said after the satellite delay, which always made it sound as if people hadn’t quite heard you.

  “Pardon? Is this Sophie’s mother?”

  Delay. “Yes, but my name is not Book.”

  “What…? Oh…okay. Listen, I’m really sorry about your husband …”

  “We
are divorced.”

  “Right, I knew that.”

  “Kaljang Sherpa tells me there is still no sign of them.” Soft but firm, quietly urgent, like the voice of a woman instructing a lover on a rendezvous. Slight accent. A husky voice. He drew himself up as if she were eyeing him from across a bar.

  “Right, but the Chinese should have them back here soon. I’d guess by this aft. The guys who took them must be in deep, uh…in deep trouble with their own people.”

  “Their embassy says they still haven’t any information, but will try to issue a statement today.”

  “Which means heads are rolling as we speak.”

  Delay. “Is it true you will be climbing back up the mountain now?”

  “Uh, that’s correct, but Kal, Ming, Jigme and your daughter will remain here.”

  Longer delay. As if she’s scanning the Internet for breaking news. “Aren’t some of those names you mention leaving? To take the refugees down to the city?”

  “Well, uh…not to the city, no. I mean, they will be taking them over to Tarap, yeah—but then returning, right away. And I doubt they’ll be ready to go till…well, it’s hard to say. They might not even end up leaving till tomorrow.”

  “And then it will be only Kaljang and my daughter in the camp?”

  “Your husband will be here by then. Lew, I mean. And Amaris McRae, the filmmaker.”

  “I know who Amaris McRae is. You seem sure they will be back.”

  “I’d stake my name on it,” he said, grinning bitterly. “And listen, Nika”—he lowered his voice—“don’t worry about Kaljang and Sophie on their own. Kal’s a good guy.”

  “What…? That isn’t what I meant.”

  “You sure you wouldn’t like to speak to her? I can go wake her up right now.”

  “It’s you I want to talk to.”

  And Lawson, just like that, had had enough. The strain of being personable while somebody tweaks, needles, prods away at you—how did others endure it, in offices, public positions, day in, day out?