Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  “Mama?”

  Lawson nods toward Sophie, lowers his voice: “And what if the Chinese bring her dad back up here tomorrow, with Mari? They probably will. They’ll have to. This is like some…international kidnapping. The Chinese don’t want this, right? With the Olympics coming? They’ll probably send them right back up tomorrow, before the media gets involved, and Soph should be here.”

  “Why are you talking about the Olympics?” she blurts, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece—then goes back to talking, whispering to her mother. Tears starting, her voice half cramping. “It’s crazy, Mama. I can’t believe any of this.”

  “Listen, everyone,” Lawson calls. Everyone already is. “I’ve spoken to the Nepalis in Kathmandu and they’re not asking us to kill this climb. They’re sending Gurkhas up to Tarap, to meet these people halfway. It’s all good. It’s going to work.”

  “Yes, you told this,” Mingma says with a puzzled frown.

  “I cannot”—Lawson karate-chops his palm—“kill this climb!”

  “I can leave, maybe, my nephew,” Mingma says.

  “Tashi? One Sherpa?”

  “And Shiva, maybe.”

  “I need Sherpas!”

  “I’ll climb,” Kaljang says softly, as if not wanting Sophie to overhear. “I really want to climb.”

  Mingma speaks sharply to Kaljang in Sherpa, then tells Lawson, “Anyway, we come back from Tarap, six days, maybe five, then, maybe, okay, all climb. If the doctor—”

  “Too late. You’d have to reacclimatize and by the time you do we’ll be stuck for food and it’ll be too late in the year. And my permit will expire.” The one I’ll still be paying for when the last Himalayan glacier melts. “And who’ll be here to run base camp and take the phone? Kal’s my base camp guy. We’ll be swamped with calls, any minute. Don’t you want to—”

  “We’d be okay without acclimatizing,” says Kaljang, a novice with no high-altitude experience. “I would.”

  “Forget it,” Lawson snaps—though in fact Kaljang has given him an idea. “I can’t be losing anyone on this climb. That would be the end.”

  “It’s why you need doctor,” Mingma says. “And the doctor is gone!”

  “I told you, he’ll be back.”

  “Maybe not soon,” Mingma says softly, glancing at the girl.

  “I need you to leave me three Sherpas.”

  “But there is only me and the four.”

  “I know, damn it! But I hired you and you work for me and you can’t just tell me you’re all packing it in and leaving, because the fact is…because you work for me.”

  The man ponders him, as if Lawson were a gaping crevasse.

  “We have a contract, Ming—all the Sherpas do.”

  “Pardon me, Wade Lawson, but I am sirdar and my Sherpas pursue me.”

  “Break your contract and I’ll see that other climbers hear about it.”

  “But, what do climbers say if they know we don’t help these? This is an urgency!”

  “We are helping! Plus, there’s your drinking”—the words thrust their way out of Lawson, though in fact he likes Ming and thinks he functions pretty well, considering—“not a great recommendation.”

  One of the sleeping Tibetans, a man in a ripped orange parka, has wakened and propped himself on his elbow. The others, Sherpas included, glance back and forth between the arguing men. Mingma gently drapes the monk’s robe over the hideous knee. He stands and speaks with a sort of cornered dignity: “I am sirdar on so many climbs, Wade Lawson, and the Sherpas pursue my orders. Kaljang, too. Tomorrow morn, we guide these down to Tarap. My nephew I do leave you, and Shiva. Miss Book can choose what to do for her own. You may choose if you want us to return from Tarap, okay. You may choose if you want to make a climb on your own, okay, but I think a wrong idea.”

  Eyes on Lawson. The Tibetans, he senses, know what is going on. This bolted attention seems to call for a dramatic response, but for a moment he feels outmanoeuvred, beaten—a feeling he once thought himself immune to.

  Then, in a flash, he works out a new route.

  “With or without Sherpas,” he says, “this climb will continue. Tomorrow, after you leave. But someone needs to be here at base camp. Two people, at least. I mean—forget about me—what if more Tibetans make it over the pass? Plus…plus, I need people on the phone here, twenty-four hours a day. The media, Ming, they’ll be all over this by the middle of tonight, and we need to get this story out to the world—don’t we? And Shiv’s English …”

  Mingma stalls, mouth open under his small moustache. “It’s true,” he says, “about the phone. But, I wish you would stay in base camp, Wade Lawson …”

  “I’ve come twelve thousand miles.”

  No sound but the stove’s gassy hiss.

  “Ming—I need Kal as well as Tash.”

  The man nods, barely. “I guess Kaljang’s English…maybe best.”

  “By far.”

  “I guess…I leave him and Tashi, then.”

  “Okay!” Lawson says briskly. “I can accept that.”

  Sophie, softly on the phone: “I can’t believe he’s trying to go on with it after what’s happened.”

  Someone has given the girl a cigarette. Lawson will let that one go too.

  The moment Sophie stretches out in her mummy bag she knows it’s no use trying to lie still and do nothing, let alone sleep. She will have to go after him.

  The moon is up, a few days past full, her small tent suffused with blue light as if she has pitched camp under a halogen street lamp. On the glacier it will be bright enough to read, or write in a journal, as she knows well, having done it a couple of times, before being chased back to the nest of her tent by icy breezes blowing up the glacier or over the shoulder of Kyatruk. But this night is windless. Ideal conditions to cross the border and follow the trail down the glacier. The guards and soldiers and their captives and her father and Amaris will not have gone far. When she lost sight of them, far down the glacier, it was already dusk. Her father looked back once, from a distance that would have made it hard, she thinks, for him to see her. She couldn’t read his face but she knew he was looking for her, and he seemed to slow and stop, as if to take a more focused look, and the bizarrely tall soldier on his right, holding his arm, said something and her father ignored him and kept searching till a soldier seized his other arm and tugged hard. Just then—when she should have been watching most carefully, she thinks, or taking photos—her sight fogged up with tears that felt scalding to her unblinking eyes in that cold air. Forget about me, she should have yelled—a phrase she has heard someone else use tonight—Wade Lawson? Forget about me, I’ll be okay. Just don’t do anything crazy.

  She guesses the soldiers and captives will have camped by the lake at the bottom of the glacier. Even if they’ve gone a bit farther, they’ll be bedded down by whatever track or road leads to the soldiers’ base, and she can catch them easily if she follows the marked trail down the glacier. She doesn’t trust her father. She knows her father. All her instincts urge that this situation, already serious, could quickly worsen. Her presence might keep him from acting reckless, and also restrain the soldiers, because she’s still a child, technically, and most adults can be trusted not to hurt children, can’t they? And when was it, she wonders, that she started worrying more about her father than he worries about her? It’s not fair. A moment like that must come eventually for every child and parent, but for her and him it’s forty years too soon. So she tells herself. Then recalls that she’s in Asia with him because of his concern about her, what was happening at home.

  She feels the tent floor for her cellphone and flashlight. Heat-seeking drafts of cold air invade the down bag as she gropes, wondering why she can’t just leave things in the same place and hearing her mother’s calmly exasperated voice. She sits up and pulls on a Shetland sweater—a shapeless, pilled thing of her father’s but warmer than anything of her own—over the hooded fleece she wears at night. Then her parka.


  She has already downloaded the video footage from her cellphone onto her laptop, but now she studies it again while burning two copies on CD. The laptop, like the cellphone, could use a recharge at the control tent, and because of the air up here it keeps revving strenuously, but there is enough power and she knows this blurred, jolty footage is important. She can picture it on news sites, on YouTube—an important recording of an atrocity, something to help the Tibetan cause. Not that she can upload it from here, where there’s no satellite dish. She wishes it was better and she blames herself again for not bringing her digital camera to the border stone, but how could she have known? She’d taken enough sunset views. She pauses the image she was waiting for: her father crouched down during that gunfire, the woman in the red parka lying on the glacier a little beyond him, guards and soldiers approaching. The image makes it look like her father has been hit and is bent double over a wound—maybe about to collapse, like the old Tibetan man standing a few feet from the shot woman. Sophie’s heart accelerates, as if it needs to. What she has been wondering: is it possible her father actually has been hit, in the side or arm? True, after some seconds—here, watch him—he straightens and darts a look back and shouts something unclear on the audio, although she recalls it as Stay there!, and he tramps down toward the captured Tibetans before the frame jiggles (Lobsang, jostling her) and he’s lost to view, her lens framing the nearer Tibetans and Amaris, who’s filming…but maybe he was just putting on a strong facade. Hiding the hurt. That would be so like him.

  She stuffs her daypack with a plastic water bottle and crackers and sunglasses and her toilet kit and a T-shirt and extra underwear and a half-roll of toilet paper—“white man’s prayer flag,” Kaljang and Tashi call it—then pauses a few seconds before adding her journal and the small box of tampons and pads. Including them means admitting that she might be gone for more than a couple of days. All right. Her hand hovers over the pile of paperbacks, some of her choosing, others part of the deal she made with her father when he pre-empted her first semester of grade twelve and brought her to Asia. She likes some of this required reading a lot, some a lot less. In the Tagore Reader she found lines she wrote in her journal, though she would be horrified if anyone else, parents, friends, ever read them there. When the patter of rain at night brought dreams from the dreamland, and mother’s voice in the evening gave meaning to the stars.

  She takes two of her own books, Persepolis and Beloved, and one of his, small and challenging, Beyond Postmodern Physics.

  Kaljang is slumped asleep at the table when she ducks into the control tent, a microclimate of hot, humid air rife with stinks that are almost welcome at this moment because they signify life, the human crowd. Both satellite phones lie on the table by Kaljang’s elbows and beside the right one is a sheet of paper on which numbered lines are written in large, bold caps, with lots of strident underlining. Even if she hadn’t seen Wade’s handwriting before—SMOKING DISALLOWED IN CONTROL TENT!!—she would have known it was his. By Kaljang’s head, a mugful of cold-looking tea, two ballpoint pens and a foolscap notepad showing one scrawled line. A battery lamp hangs from the tent-peak above him. Over his folded hands, his head is wrenched sideways in handsome profile, lips squashed against the sleeve of his fleece. A hank of blue-black hair (shiny but somehow never greasy) lies over his upturned eye as if carefully arranged to block the light. Past the table’s end, where the medical supplies are spread out, Mingma Lama lies on his back on the floor, no pad under him, no sleeping bag, his brown, mummied hands crossed over his chest. His face under the lamp is weirdly shiny and perfectly still, like the face of a frozen body being thawed.

  The propane stove murmurs and in dim corners of the tent the refugees sleep, the children in down bags the Sherpas rounded up for them, the adults furled up in their coats. None of them stirs. Sophie would have expected snoring, long sighs—symptoms of heavy, emptied slumber—but these people sleep in silence, as if it’s a habit of secrecy they’ve cultivated while in flight.

  She has prepared herself to speak to Kaljang, explain things, but now she realizes it never would have worked, he would not have let her go. Finding him asleep like this is best. She slips over to the table. On top of the foolscap pad she sets the CD-ROMs. S.B.’S VID OF ATTACK, she has labelled them. She knows that Kal will ensure they go down with Mingma to Tarap. He looks beautiful here, asleep by the phones, both more boyish and more adult than usual. A boy simply sleeping, a man weighed down with exhausting duties. It’s a weight that will get heavier with her departure, because Wade, she senses, was hoping she would handle most of the phone traffic, once it gets going, and probably planned to have Kaljang porter stuff up to Camps One and Two. Now she guesses Kaljang will be on the phones twenty-four hours a day. She wishes she could kiss him goodbye, on the cheek, and as she looks at him she shivers with tenderness, a strange sensation that makes her feel older than her age. They’ve necked a couple of times—Kaljang darting his tongue with wonder across her front braces—once behind the boulders and once on the easy slope north of base camp, when they tried snowboarding together on her board, him squeezed beside her, and laughed themselves helpless and wiped out, but she stopped him after a certain point, when he tried to rush it.

  Like her father, Sophie will not be rushed.

  She slips out of the tent into the still, searing cold and walks with crunching steps toward the edge of camp and behind her the satellite phone goes off—awful in this silence, like an alarm detonating in a store as you leave, pockets filled with pinched stuff. There’s no second ring, just Kaljang’s startled “Hello?” And from just beyond the control tent the sound of a smaller tent zippering open—Wade Lawson, she thinks, and speeds up.

  If this moon were the sun, its angle in the sky would mean the day was getting late, fewer hours of light left than she’d thought or would wish. Around her the Himalayas heave up into space and jab at the dense froth of the stars. The glacier glows beneath her as if radioactive. She crosses the border. In the place where the nun and the old man fell, a sprawling stain, darker than Sophie’s passing shadow.

  Anger is almost as good as exertion when it comes to keeping warm. For a long time now she has been pursuing her father in her thoughts, or pretending his absences don’t matter because his work is so important and she shouldn’t be selfish, then chasing him mentally anyway, afraid he won’t make it back. The last few years, of course, she has pretended not to care. Now she actually has travelled to the other side of the planet and he has slipped away again. That he is affectionate, fun and kind, never smothering when he’s with her…hard to say if that makes things better or worse.

  Every hundred steps or so a pennant marks the trail: a triangle of red cloth on a waist-high aluminum rod. Her steps echo faintly off the granite walls cupping the wide glacier. There’s the growl of an avalanche or a rockslide high up in the peaks, where snow-fields absorb the moon’s light and emit a dim, focused glow, as if in meditation. If not for her steps echoing, the solitude and immensity might be terrifying as well as beautiful. It is terrifying. She slips the earbuds under the rim of her hood and turns on the cellphone MP3 player, loud enough to help her walk but not so loud that she won’t hear if something comes up behind her—though there’s nothing out here, of course, according to her father and everyone else. Nothing but human adults.

  Not much of a comfort there.

  If she could have snowboarded down. It makes her grin, the notion. Impossible with the surface so hard, grainy with embedded gravel. What a strange thing a grin is out here. Mark Lanegan has the sexiest voice possible, but she turns the music down further, knowing the charge in her MP3 player won’t last more than a couple more hours.

  The downward pitch eases, the marked trail detouring around a blue-lipped slash in the ice, a metre wide in places. There’s a swath of something leading to the edge of it, dark like the blood up by the border stone. For a moment she stares at the swath, unsure whether to approach the crevasse, while Mark Lanegan sings about
a wedding gown in a husky, unmarried-sounding way. She turns off the song. From deep in the glacier, an echo of trickling water. Her spine is ice, as if the night has found a way inside. Her pulse high in her throat. She won’t approach the crevasse, though it pulls at her, seems to want her down there too. Before her father started leaving for longer periods and returning subdued and distracted, her parents as a duo created a warm, lively feeling at home, a chaotic harmony that made her eventual collisions with adult cruelty and conflict a shock. She’d thought fighting was what kids, like herself and her brother, did. Adults were too mature for that, too composed. Even during the trial separation her parents were civil to each other—no, more than that, they were kind. It’s scary now to think that maybe there are no adults.

  She looks into the distance. On the surface of the lake, at the toe of the glacier, the mirrored moon floats. How fast she seems to be losing it. No sign of firelight or lamplight, but they must be camped down there somewhere, no one would be out marching in this cold in the middle of the night. A thrill at her own daring flares through her, and the thought of how proud her father will be, under his anger.

  She looks back up the glacier toward base camp, out of sight over the top of the pass. The lobe of the glacier is vast and dimly phosphorescing. She can’t imagine climbing back.

  She crawls and seat-slides down off the ice where it tapers, steeply and suddenly, to a crust above a slope of gravel. From under this terminal ledge, a gargling of water that now sluices out into the light, flashing in a veil of icy vapour, cascading down and away. Small floes on the lake below circle in the current. Here the air is less bitter, but it still burns her nostrils and throat as she pants. Amaris has a parka, her father only a thick fisherman’s sweater, no toque. Sophie’s boots on the switchbacks down the slope are clumsy with the cold and her hurry. The moon approaching a silhouetted ridge. It’s almost four a.m. and she can look a long way down the unglaciated part of the valley, which curves to the east in a way you can’t see from the top of the pass—an immense, perfectly U-shaped groove that the shrunken glacier used to fill, though it looks like it might have been formed by a sphere the size of the moon rumbling down out of the mountains.