by Mike Bond
“Where?”
“An empty garden somewhere. A few hours’ sleep. I'm so tired I can't figure anything out.”
“I'm sorry, Sam – I've been so upset…You've killed a man – it must be awful.”
He reached for her. “I'd kill him a thousand times over for what he's done. My only regret is now I have to run and can't face them openly. That now I can't expect anyone to believe me. Give me a blanket, some matches?”
She brought a blanket from the bedroom and a box of wooden matches with a leaping tiger on the cover. He started to tell her about the leopard but stopped, thinking of Paul.
Her lips were trembling again. “I'll not take the chance of missing him.” She grimaced brightly. “No one'll bother me, anyway.”
“If he's late, or if I can't stay in K'du, we've got a backup. In Paris, a bar called Le Serpent d'Etoiles. Where we used to hang out.”
“Before my time.”
“So if anything goes wrong, that's where to find me.”
“If anything goes wrong?” She shook her head. “You must be crazy, Sam. Everything's already gone wrong.”
“You should sleep.” He dredged up a smile from the depths of exhaustion. “So tomorrow you can cast eloquence before the unwashed.”
“They're cleaner than I am, Sam.”
“I didn't intend it like that.” He brushed at the hair pasted with tears to the side of her cheek. “It's just that all human effort seems a waste…”
“They starve; the ones who survive are always hungry. Their parents die at forty. Still they're happier than we. I can see it in their eyes. Grateful for the blessing of life.”
“It is a gift, God-given. How we trample it.” He took her hand, feeling her head and shoulder against his chest. The lamp wavered in a draft, stilled. Far away a dog moaned in hunger.
5
HE UNROLLED THE COARSE, itchy blanket and sat up to scratch bedbug bites. The light was gray, its edges sharp with cold, acrid with cooking fires and pungent with human and animal dung. “Welcome to exotic Katmandu,” he mumbled, in his mind a Samoan beach, a dark girl in a white bikini, white orchid in her hand, and below her the words, “The first day of the rest of your life.”
Unmelodious tinny complaint of Hindi song from a distant radio, mutter of hens, aggrievement of a donkey. By his head, a stone block engraved with a snake ingesting its tail. The two-step snake. He shuddered. It's a gratuity, what I have now. I was meant to die back there.
Yellowed suntala leaves floated on a murky pool; tendrils of algae reached up from its shallow bottom. Ants traced one edge; he stepped round them and watched the mist fill with dawn between the nearby crouched huts and sloping walls. A cock crowed; he ducked as a bicycle jingled down the alley beyond the wall.
He folded the blanket and stuffed it between the wall and the clustered trunks of a magnolia, tightened the laces on Paul's shoes. One snapped and he relaced and retied it, climbed the wall and dropped into the alley.
A rickshaw clanged past, a fat Newari pulled by an emaciated puffing man in a knit cap whose feet slapped wetly on the pavement. By the stupa grounds a naked child squatted, pai dogs circling nervously. As she stood they leapt between her feet for the sallow tumulus of excrement, knocking her down. Without tears she rose and moved away.
Women in thin saris crouched over twig fires between sagging huts, fragrances of chutney, curry, lentils, and tea rising from their dented, blackened pots. Fog blocked distant views and sounds, muffling his steps, Katmandu in the mucilaginous light seeming more an endless village than a city, its serpentine alleys branching on unpredicted vistas that hinted at open country then inturned to reveal new facets of the city.
He ducked through a skin door into a smoky hut. Blue flanks of meat and stalks of brittle herbs hung from its beams. A swarthy, squat woman shifted pots on a low woodstove. “Namasté, daju,” she called.
“Namasté, little sister.”
Two men in leather vests drank chai at a table near the unlit fire; they did not look at him. The other tables were empty, flies lifting from them briefly in the breeze of his entrance.
“So, daju, you have been in the Himal?”
“For two weeks.”
“And your friends?”
“They stay. I go back.”
“The wife of the black one, she comes often.”
“You are with what today, little sister?”
Her grin showed a gold tooth. “We are with baisi, eggs, rice, even goat – but that was last week's.”
“… and Nescafé?”
“We are with.”
His back against the rough wall, he watched the single half-window whose crude glass fractured the light into unrecognizable shapes and colors as shapes of passersby flitted across it. She brought him thick slabs of baisi, water buffalo cow, in a sage and curry sauce, brown rice, a cup of hot water, a tin of instant coffee, and a rusty spoon.
He stirred the dark powder into the water, inhaling its weak coffee odor that was not Paris, not espresso in a sunny midmorning café while a waiter swept chestnut leaves from under his table, a slim lovely woman in brown tights stepping up from the metro and crossing to his table.
She bent to kiss him, her dark hair coiling down his chest. “Qu'ils sont salauds. Bastards! Ils sont vaches, fils de putains, couillons – merde!”
He grinned and steadied the table as she sat. “You didn't get the part?”
“Si tu peux voir, the bete, the dog, they gave it to – if you could see her!” She flipped her bag onto the table, rummaging for a comb. “J'ai pas faim.”
“That's just because you're mad, Sylvie. Have an express, a brioche…It's good you didn't get the part.”
“T'es fou?”
“I have a better idea.”
“Mais je l'ai tant voulu!” She paused, coppery eyes damp, tucked her chair close to his. “I hate to lose. I so wanted that part. It was perfect for me!” She folded his hand over hers and kissed his fingers. “Mais que je t'aime! And I won't ever let anyone else get you. Jamais, jamais, jamais. I'm the only one who'll ever be allowed to love you. So what's this fine idea?”
“Let's go back. I'll never make it in European football – I don't have the leg agility. And I can never play in Canada again with this shoulder, but I can coach. I want to go back to Canada and coach. Or maybe now Vietnam's over they'll stop boycotting me in the States. I love Paris, but I have to face that I'll never make it here.”
“You must give it time, Samuel. Oh! How you are impatient!”
“Let's go back and get married in Quebec. Your father would love it. My folks'll fly in from Montana – they can all meet each other.” He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers, feeling its warmth. “I'm tired of fooling around. I never want to love anyone else in the world. The football talk's pretext. Why're you smiling?”
“I'm thinking of my father in his bar telling all his customers his daughter's coming home from Paris to Quebec to get married. You're right, he would so like that.”
“AND YOUR HUNGER?” A voice at his shoulder.
“Ho, it is gone, little sister. Yet I seek more.”
“What?”
“Eternal Snow, that comes from your land.”
The Tibetan woman laughed. “You faraway people think only of hashish!” She took his plate. “Soon one who knows will be here.”
HE DRANK more coffee, watching the door. The room filled with dark men in sheepskins and dirty wool blankets, black braids down their backs, their faces scarred and hardened by the weather. A tall, slender man leaned over his table. “I am the one you seek.”
“Coffee?”
“Ho.”
The man sat awkwardly, not familiar with benches. The woman brought him a cup of hot water. Cohen swirled Nescafé into the darkening reflection of the ceiling beams and passed the cup to him. “Eternal Snow,” Cohen said, “like many fine things, comes only from Tibet.” The man bent to sip. Cohen waited till he had straightened, then continued, “I seek
one who is with.”
“In what amount?”
“As large as possible.”
“In…” The Tibetan sought a Nepali word, hands unfolding upward.
“… return for?” Cohen replied.
“Ho. In return for what?” The man raised his chin, black slitted eyes on Cohen's, his eyebrows arched from the flat planes of his cheeks over his jutting nose, above the flat seam of his lips.
“What is most valuable in Tibet?”
The hands turned over. “It is a poor country…”
“Little sister,” Cohen called, “you are pleased to bring hot water again for my friend?” He spooned out more coffee. “But Tibet is a brave country.”
“Bravery in itself is nothing.”
“Without bravery, life is nothing.”
“It is difficult to fight tanks and planes with stones.”
Cohen was silent. The tall Tibetan lifted a small clay pipe and a leather bag from a fold in his blanket. He took a pale chunk of hashish from the bag and shaved some into the pipe, stood the pipe on the table, walked to the stove and returned with a small coal between his fingertips, placed the coal atop the pipe, and offered it.
The smoke was sweet and very strong, blending with the coal's wood taste and the adobe flavor of the pipe. The tall Tibetan smoked in turn, stopping to shave more flakes into the bowl. Beyond his shoulder the window shimmered like a sheet of ice, like snow blown before the sun, a pool of stars. Cohen saw the slab-cheeked men hunched under their braids, their faces betraying nothing. He sensed himself a cave man midst an alien tribe. These are the people who killed Alex. Who will kill me the second they recognize me. But who are my only clue. “Soon I cross the water,” he said. “I would purchase Eternal Snow for my friends there.”
The Tibetan's bronze lips parted in a smile. “As you say in Nepali tongue, in return for?”
Cohen did not speak. The greasy, roughhewn table was suffused with meaning. He felt that if he never spoke again it would make no difference. Flies rimmed his cup; he watched them indifferently. “My friends are with many guns, from the war of Vietnam.”
“I do not know this war. It is now?”
“It is finished.”
“Your friends win, then?”
“Huena.”
“How are they with guns if they lose this war?”
“There were many guns.”
“They will not be good.”
“It was not lost by reason of the guns. A large country fought a small, brave country, as China fights Tibet.”
The tall Tibetan waved his hand in a scoffing motion, flies rising from the table in alarm. “You speak too simply.”
Cohen watched the flies settle. “That is true.”
“You wish to take Eternal Snow across the water, in return for guns?”
“Ho.”
“The juniper on the mountain has many leaves.” The tall Tibetan played loosely with his cup, his fingernails pitch-stained and attenuated. “I am but a leaf on a juniper in the Himal. I am not the tree. The tree is not the mountain.” He stood and adjusted the long knife at his belt. “Bholé I come, here to the Globe.”
“Tomorrow is too late.”
“You faraway people do not understand time.”
“We must talk now.”
“I will speak now, then, with the juniper. In our tongue his name means Undying. You are curious why?”
“No.”
“He was a boy when the Chinese cut his throat on Gunthangla, the High Plains Pass. His blood stayed in him. Twice more they have killed him with bullets. Yet he lives, and those who have crossed him are dead. It is wise to deal with him clearly.”
“Have no fear.”
“It is not for me to fear, but you.” The tall Tibetan stepped through the skin door, letting in sunlight and noises of the city.
Cohen paid and cautiously inspected the alley. Nothing suspicious in the medley of passing voices and colors. Above the shop next door a carved balcony overlooked the street; he paid the shopkeeper ten rupees to let him sit there in the warming sun, out of view of the street yet able to observe it. Yes, if we'd stayed in Paris Sylvie wouldn't be dead. Nor Alex, nor Goteen. Why am I never satisfied? He rested his head on his folded arms; after a while he dozed, waking every few moments to glance into the street.
Footsteps halted beside him. The leather boots were fringed with blue beads; above them threadbare levis, a sash with a bone-hafted knife, a leather shirt, long braids beaded and twined with varicolored cloth, a hawk face haloed by sky.
The man squatted; the tall Tibetan stood behind him. This one was older, his face narrower, his eyes almost invisible under black brows. As he adjusted his stance, his chin lifted to reveal a thumb-wide glossy scar across his throat from jawbone to jawbone. “You are the one with guns?”
THEY LED HIM through the crowded, hot streets to a dusty road of weathered huts, and beyond to the Tibetan refugee camp, where the white tents of the U.N. and Swiss aid programs speckled the grassless hills and blackeyed children played at war, ducking under the bellies of tethered ponies, with guns of sticks and stone grenades.
He lost direction as they twisted and turned among the endless tents. A boy in a beaded cap was splitting kindling with a kukri; Cohen realized he had seen him ten minutes before. “I am enough lost,” he said to Undying. “Take me to the mountain.”
Undying said nothing, his soft-soled boots treading a clump of cropped, spiky weed. A young bare-chested man was currying a shaggy pony, a Kalashnikov dismantled on the grass beside him. With a sudden hollow stomach Cohen recognized him as one of Stihl's guerrillas on the Kali Gandaki. He moved quickly to the far side of the tall Tibetan. Undying strode steadily before them, his bone-hafted knife swinging loosely in its sheath.
Undying motioned him into a tent and disappeared. Inside, airlessly hot, stank of grease and canvas. He faced the door. Above it, strangely, hung a cross.
If that guy with the AK saw me I'm dead. Nothing I can do. Dead. Dead. Dead. Cut me up alive and throw my pieces to the ravens. Relax. Run. No, relax. His body, cold and sweaty, felt suddenly thin, weak. He bit his lip and waited.
Against the tent's sidewall was tilted a backboard with a sleeping baby. Flies clustered like grapes over the baby's eyes. Finally Cohen sat cross-legged on the ground; the tall Tibetan hunkered down facing him, back to the door. Cohen ignored the urge to chase flies from the baby's face, knowing it would be seen as a sign of weakness. The tent flap jumped aside and Undying entered, an old man behind him.
“This is the one?” The old man's eyes were sardonyx under spidery brows, their light utterly without warmth. Scars radiated over his face; his teeth were large and thin. Stringy muscles rippled under the hairless chestnut skin of his arms. From one elongated earlobe a cameo earring dangled.
Cohen took off his glasses. “Undying has told you…”
“Undying speaks for himself. What are the guns?”
“M16's, some pistols, grenades.”
“Where?”
“Two days from Katmandu.”
“Why art thou with guns in India?”
“Perhaps they are not in India.”
“Where else, two days away?”
“They are to fight Pakistan.” Cohen flicked his hand; the flies buzzed angrily round the baby's eyes. “I come to take Stihl's place.”
“Who says this?”
“Our chief.”
“Stihl is in the Kali Gandaki.”
“He is dead in Katmandu.”
“Only three weeks past we bring much Eternal Snow to the Americans, exchanging for guns. Why now more?”
“Many in America now prefer to be friends with China. Yet Eternal Snow gains more value in our country, is easy to find in yours.”
The old man spoke in Tibetan with Undying. “Thou,” he said to Cohen, “bring some guns for us to see. Then we discuss payment.” He rubbed his chin. “For years the Americans bring Russian guns, that are better. Why now American guns?”
Cohen took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. “When it rains, do not complain of thirst. These are what we are with.”
The old man stood. “In two days, then.”
“In four. Two going, two coming back.”
“How is Stihl dead in Katmandu, and not with our people in the Kali Gandaki?”
“Because the bomb is broken. He failed and was killed.”
“What is broken?”
“The fire like the sun.”
“I do not know it.”
“The bomb to kill Chinese.”
“I do not know of this.” The old man glanced at Undying, who shook his head. “Only guns were to be in the Kali Gandaki. It is of Stihl, this fire?”
“Ho. It is broken in the canyon below Muktinath. Who of your people knows of it?”
“No one, if not I.” Again the old man looked at Undying.
Cohen stood. “You are with the name of the new contact?”
“What is the name?”
“Show me the name and address you are with.”
Undying ducked from the tent. The old man bent to follow him, turned to Cohen. “We will wait for him outside.”
“I will stay here. It is best not to be known.”
The old man stood. “As thou wish.” He followed Cohen's gaze to the cross on the wall. “It is of long ago, that.” He slipped it from the tent wall and handed it to Cohen.
It was a true cross, black hardwood, intricately worked, perhaps ten inches long, the fierce head of a horse carved at the top. It felt light, well balanced. Cohen tried to hand it back. The old man watched him. “You have not discovered its real power.”
Somehow Cohen wanted to be rid of it. Again he tried to hand it back but the old man didn't take it. With a fingertip the old man touched the shaft of the cross. “Pull that.”
It came away easily. It was not just the shaft of the cross but also the sheath of a slender two-faced blade, hideously sharp. “It is strange,” the old man said, “that in your religion you nailed God to a tree like that. Why?”
