Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  “Come on,” Book whispers, watching the fugitives, “almost there.” He locks eyes with a teenage boy in blue work pants and a fleece-lined jean jacket, who looks back at him with a drained but dogged gaze, mouth panting, as if Book were the marshal at the finish line of a marathon. Beside the kid, a nun with a red parka over long, wine-red robes and flashing white sneakers. She is young and running and seems to have strength in reserve. They’ve almost reached the border stone, the tangled Chinese flag, but he can’t let them stop there because the true border now lies slightly beyond and he believes the soldiers will chase them at least that far. He starts toward them. In his heart, that familiar mix of indignation at an obvious wrong and the reluctance, even resentment, of a good-natured man who hates conflict but can’t seem to avoid it.

  A hoarse cry, a crashing volley of gunfire. By his ear a fizzing sound like a beer can being opened. He’s unaware of ducking but he’s hunched low over his legs—frozen in place. The young nun lies on the snow a few body lengths short of the border stone and her red parka and her robes seem to be melting off her and expanding over the snow. An old man in a sashed sheepskin coat stoops toward her, slowly, as if puzzled or wondering if he can help; then he grips his chest and crumples. The volley of shots has not stopped the Tibetans but stampeded them. The lead group spills toward and across the border, passing Book on either side as if he were invisible. He smells them—buttery sweat and woodsmoke and the acrid ketones of hunger, fear. He has glanced back to check on his daughter, but now he can’t move forward, as he must, to reach the nun who lies weltering in a slurry of crimson snow and the old man with his face pressed into her lower back. The slower Tibetans stand or sit just short of the border, their hands in the air, the blue swat team moving among them. The four fugitives carrying the body have sagged onto the glacier with their burden. The man cradling the child is on his knees, quaking with soundless sobs. Others crying loudly, wailing. A young monk in robes and a parka haunches down beside the father, talking to him. Five men in camouflage gear, down vests and earflap caps, led by a doughy, tired-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses and a pistol, tramp past their prisoners and toward the border stone and Lewis Book.

  He has heard about paralysis under fire. He never has faced direct, aimed fire, though he has been in dangerous locations often enough, twice under bombardment. But never at high altitude. Is this what’s happening here? Strange that while paralyzed with fear on a Himalayan glacier, where someone you love more than your own substance could also be in danger and where others you want to help might be dying, a part of you is capable of feeling mundane embarrassment, as if you just spilled a tumbler of Scotch on the emcee at a gala fundraiser in Toronto. Then the thought leaps through his bizarrely clear mind that Sophie and the others will be watching the Tibetans, not him.

  “Papa, don’t move!” he hears her call, and it springs him back into motion, as stiff in the legs as if he were hatching from a body cast. Glancing back at her—her raccooned eyes staring over the boulder, cellphone still in position—he yells, “Stay where you are!” with extra force on the stay, as if to suggest that immobility, like his own just now, is a wise and necessary tactic. He turns and hurries downslope toward the fallen Tibetans as the officer and soldiers trudge up to meet him. By the border stone he veers a few degrees so as not to collide with the Chinese, but the officer, his thick eyebrows crimped to a scowl above his glasses, swerves to block him. The man lowers his pistol and raises the other hand, the palm glazed with sweat. Book points at the fallen Tibetans. “I’m going to help them.” With a slight bow he steps to one side, like a partner in some mannered dance or game. The officer moves to block him and again Book slips around him and the man explodes, barking some high, shrill phrase, shaking the pistol next to Book’s ear. Book walks past, staring straight ahead. Someone calls out in Chinese behind them and the officer quits yelling mid-sentence and starts away, back up the glacier. Book glances back. He wonders if the Chinese will actually approach the prayer flag boulders, or base camp itself, but the men and the officer halt a few strides short of Amaris, who is still taping. Beside her, Lawson frames big, hyperbolic hand gestures as he roars at the Chinese in fractured English. We no understand you! Here is border! A soldier pointing at Amaris, the officer shouting again, clawing at the air in front of his face, a clear signal, Lower your camera. Behind her the escaped Tibetans are being ushered deeper into Nepal—into base camp—by Lobsang, Shiva, Jigme. Sophie is still by the boulders with Kaljang, watching Book.

  “Go into base camp,” he shouts at her. “Now!”

  She hesitates, then begins to run after the others.

  He turns and runs down to the bodies in the snow. Kneels and shoves a hand down the neck of his sweater and draws his glasses from his shirt pocket. Triage on the glacier. The nun has fallen face down, her arms tangled under her. Blood no longer pumps from the entry wound just below her nape—bright arterial blood, darkening into her parka and the snow. He has seen bullet wounds before. He slips two fingers under her chin for a jugular pulse and there’s nothing, as he feared. His fingers emerge bloody.

  He turns to the old man in the rank sheepskin coat. His back, where Book expected to see an entry wound, is unmarked. There are rips in the coat but no holes or blood. Book eases him over. The man’s heavy head rolls from the small of the nun’s back onto the backs of her knees. A sunned face the colour of walnut oil—no loss of colour. A little blood on the hair but apparently not from any wound of his. Book makes a decision and tugs the man’s body clear of the nun, the back of the coat snagging on gravel in the glacier. He braces the man’s head with one hand as it slumps off the nun’s body. The grey-streaked hair parted in the middle, plaited at the back. He breathes into the man’s open mouth, thrusts with both hands ten times on the sternum and breathes into him again, deciding to give extra breaths in the rotation because of the air’s thinness. The man’s mouth has a sharp, starved odour, like scorched toast. Faint smell of caries. After a fifth round of chest compressions. Book detects a faint jugular pulse. He’s dimly aware of the captured Tibetans and the Chinese swat team watching him work. Sophie should be in the camp by now. Dizzy, he keeps breathing. When he looks up from another round of it, the officer and men are marching back down, Amaris McRae between two of them: a small Chinese-Canadian woman in athletic gear gripped by Chinese soldiers who now look much larger and, coming downhill toward Book, more menacing than before. The puffy officer in the horn-rims holds Amaris’s camcorder in one hand, his pistol in the other. From the top of the pass, at the edge of base camp, Sophie watches with Kaljang and Lawson, who is gesticulating and stamping his boot like a fool, yelling down at Book, ordering him to come back. It’s too late. Book can’t read his daughter’s expression from here. The camp, he thinks. Go back to the camp. Yet he is proud. He has to stay and augment the old man’s slender breathing. Above him, the officer says in a hoarse, mechanical way, as if reading words from a language primer, “You also will come with us.”

  TWO

  SOLO ROUTES

  “Summit,” Barry says, looking at me and smoothing a finger down each side of his moustache. “There’s no best way to get to Summit, Mrs Kane.”

  —RAYMOND CARVER,

  “So Much Water So Close to Home”

  In the time of the later Crusades, while Christian armies slogged through the Holy Land waging sacred war—converting or slaughtering the inhabitants, capturing cities or being repulsed—a Muslim army, similarly inspired, marched east from what is now Iraq, across deserts and mountains, converting or slaughtering the inhabitants, capturing cities, until finally they neared the forbidden city of Lhasa. One barrier remained: the Nyenchen Thanghla Shan, an immense escarpment bulking up out of the plateau northwest of the city. The army would have to cross this barrier via a pass almost 7,000 metres high. Thousands of men, mounted and on foot, their chain mail, helmets and lance heads flashing in the hot equinoctial sunlight, clanked upward hour after hour.

  As
the air grew colder and thinner, the men began to struggle. Some lagged behind or slumped by the wayside. Officers forced them back to their feet and drove them on. On the evening of the second day, the skies clotted with cloud. Snow began to fall, at first lightly, and the army bivouacked up in the clouds, an east wind ravening over the pass. In the scorching cold, in silk pavilions or lightweight cotton tents, the trembling army lay sleepless, except for those troops that Death was quietly recruiting as night deepened with the storm. In the morning, snow thick on the ground, the reduced army tried to march on—there could be no turning back—square into the wind, sure that the storm must yield by the will of God. It worsened. The men and horses stiffened and slowed like a host of clockwork toys winding down. By evening, still short of the pass, all movement ceased among the multitude. For hours along the trail the army in its armour stood or lay, frozen in place, as if waiting for the order to push on: infantry and cavalry vanishing under the mounting, drifting snow.

  The small force of Tibetan defenders awaiting the invaders at the pass had fled down to the plateau during the storm. Some days later—their yak teams breaking trail like bovine snowploughs—they plodded back to the summit and over the top and there they found the frozen army, the snows receding to disclose the dead. The Tibetans stripped the men of their armour and weapons and the horses of their tack and caparisons and loaded these treasures, along with lances, scimitars, regimental standards and helmets inscribed in Arabic, onto their yaks and returned to Lhasa. For centuries afterward, at every Tibetan New Year until the Chinese invasion, a thousand men and horses decked out in medieval armour and ornate fittings paraded through the streets of Lhasa: the frozen army revived.

  THEY WON’T STOP ME, he thinks.

  Eight p.m. and he should be 2500 feet up Kyatruk in the tandem mummy bag with Amaris, trying to convince her it’s important they get some sleep, while she, oddly energized, post-sex, scribbles in her notebook with one of those gel-point pens that keep bursting and nosebleeding everywhere. But she’s gone, frogmarched down into China along with the doctor, and Lawson is fighting to keep his expedition alive.

  For several years the words they and them have been a growing part of his private vocabulary, they being the many people or forces that by accident or, more often, out of grievance and envy attempt to screw him. And now this. Seriously, though, who’d have given odds? He’s taken ruinous risks to buy himself this last chance, this shot at reinstatement, and look at him. Awash in Buddhist nuns and elders. Lawson seldom thinks about God and he certainly never prays—he can’t see much difference between praying and panhandling, a kind of spiritual dole, and he still believes in himself too much to beg—but if he did believe in God, and Satan, he’d have to conclude they were against him now.

  He’s not one for mobs, and his sizable Control Tent now feels about as roomy as a Nepali bus. Humid, dense smells of unshowered bodies, wet sheepskin, propane, with sharper notes of cheap Chinese tobacco and MSG from the cooking ramen. (At Camp One the air will be stratospherically clear and pure and the moon will be rising out of the glacier like a disk of pristine ice, supernaturally bright. Jake and Zeph and Tashi are still up there, lucky bunch—he told them to stay put, so they could all resume their summit preparations tomorrow.) He might be flailing his arms in frustration now, stamping, hammering his fist, even pitching stuff, but you can hardly shift your weight in here without stepping on a Tibetan. Shiva has turned down the stove where he’s cooking ramen and boiling pot after pot of water, but the tent is still sweltery. The fourteen refugees—a nun, a monk, two small boys, several old folks and others of various ages and uncertain background—are crammed onto the stools around the satellite telephone table or sitting cross-legged on the tent floor. Two are stretched out, asleep. A few of the women murmur, a child weeps softly, the others eat and drink and stare and say nothing.

  Mingma Lama is here—he rushed down from Camp One, against instructions, soon after Lawson and Amaris. His eyes seem small and inflamed, his face shrivelled with strain. He’s helping Kaljang and the silent Lawson to allot painkillers from Book’s supplies and treat some of the Tibetans for horrific blisters and cuts and welts and sunburn. Lobsang is picking his way among the crowd with a fast-emptying bag of ginger snaps—the third and last bag, in fact. Jigme, earbuds still in place, sits nodding to rap tunes and playing bagh chal with a teenage Tibetan in a fleece-lined jean jacket buttoned to the collar despite the heat. The kid is chain-smoking and that breaks the rules in here but Lawson will let it go. Sophie helping Shiva at the stove and serving mugs of chai and bowls of steaming ramen with a focused gravity that might touch Lawson more if his thoughts weren’t swarming off at panicked angles. He can see she’s been crying, who can blame her, her father gone, her mother unreachable so far, but she’s holding up. Her eyeliner is rubbed and smeary, as if after a beating—black-eyed. Not a bad kid. She’s a bit concave, slouchy in that teenage way Lawson just doesn’t get, but she isn’t sullen and she strikes him as pretty motivated.

  He wedges down in front of a skittish boy whose toes look to have been fed into a wood-chipper. On either side a Tibetan woman sits, one still young, probably the mother, one older, maybe a grandmother, hump-backed, with sallow teeth and eyes. They wear garish cardigans over long striped aprons. As they slurp tea, dark faces moist from the steam, the women watch Lawson with vacated stares, as if resigned to whatever he might do next, doctor the kid, torture him. Lawson has seen that look on the faces of tired, spooked novice climbers, especially after an accident on a peak.

  “Ming. Tell this kid I need to put some antibiotic cream on his stinky feet.”

  Mingma nods, frowns, says something in a hoarse, halting voice, clearly picking his words with care and maybe some uncertainty. According to Kaljang, the Sherpa tongue is a close cousin of Tibetan but is no exact fit; it can’t help that Mingma had been tipping a mickey of Snow Leopard gin into his chai since getting down to base camp—the only place where Lawson has given up controlling the man’s intake. But Mingma’s words seem to relax the boy. Lawson, scrunching his nostrils, salves and gauzes the small outer toes and the boy makes no sound—that famous Himalayan stoicism, Lawson assumes, that he already respects so much in the Sherpas.

  The younger woman says something to him in a tremory voice. Despite her condition, he sees now, she’s attractive: wide-set eyes, dramatic cheekbones, heavy turquoise pendants hung from tiny earlobes.

  “Don’t mention it,” he says.

  “No,” says Mingma, “she asks you for something, Wade Lawson. More noodles for the boy. Chai for her mother.”

  “Right,” says Lawson, standing. His throat and chest re-constrict. He feels crowded again. A crowd squatting on his chest. “Right—another round,” he says with an attempted smile, but his voice is husky and betrays the latest hairpin swerve in his mood. Sophie’s gaze leaps to him. But what does she know. He has nothing against these people—he wishes them all the luck in the world, which unfortunately doesn’t seem like very much these days—but he has to get them out of here.

  As if talking over a direct challenge, shouting it down, he says loudly, “Thing is, we’ve left ourselves no margin for error.”

  The crowd looking up at him, paying full attention, as if they understand.

  “Of course they have to keep eating and drinking, whatever they want, for tonight, but…we’ve left ourselves no damn margin here. Zero.” Food, he’s thinking. Fuel. Time. Luckily, the Tibetans will have to leave tomorrow, according to Mingma—they need to get down to a lower elevation, for the air and the milder nights, there aren’t nearly enough extra sleeping bags to go around.

  Mingma crouches to examine the livid, cantaloupe-sized knee of the monk, who has rucked up his maroon skirts to expose it. “Yes,” says Mingma, “we are not quipped out to care for them here. As I am said, we must guide them down to Tarap.”

  “Right.” (Lawson is caught.) “I guess we can spare Jigme. And maybe Shiva. And enough food to get them to the vill
ages.”

  Mingma looks up from the monk’s knee. “But, Wade Lawson—it’s not enough. It’s two days to the first village, maybe longer for these condition. And then to Tarap. We need to carry the food for them. They are too weak.”

  “Who’s we? How many is we?”

  “And the children need to be carry part of the way, maybe more.”

  “How many of you, Ming?”

  The satellite phone starts bleating.

  “All of us would be the best. We all go together to Tarap.”

  Kaljang grabs the phone. Kathmandu again, probably.

  “I can’t do that, Ming. We can’t all go. I have paying climbers up there.” He jabs a finger toward the upper mountain and the shadow of his hand on the tent wall is a bucking pistol. If he’d had one of those this afternoon, he thinks, he wouldn’t have let them take Amaris and his doctor without a fight. He comes from a hunting family and he can shoot.

  “I’ve promised to get my paying climbers to the top. And my sponsor’s flag.”

  Sophie seems to roll her eyes.

  “It’s your mother,” Kaljang says.

  “My mother?” Lawson asks.

  The girl clatters the empty mugs on the table and grips the receiver. Kaljang plants a comforting hand on her shoulder, averting his face with affected discretion. She twists herself clear, tilts her face away, clamps the phone closer.