Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  He closes his eyes as he chews.

  Some curious lapse or lurch in time’s passage: the quiet in the cell has thickened, the air humidified, and many of the refugees are asleep, the girl lost among Sonam’s sheepskin coat and Lasya’s skirts, Lasya curled on a blanket facing them, Norbu and his friend lying back to back. Two monks are managing to share a cot, the other two stiffly supine on the floor beneath. The old nun, Dolma, lies beneath the cot on which Pema sleeps, while Choden Lhamu sits against the wall, seeming to meditate behind her glasses—though after a moment her eyes hatch open brilliantly: “Sure, Lew, go ahead and rest a little. I shall watch him for you.”

  He winces a smile. “Thanks, just a few minutes. Wake me when the officer comes.”

  He sits back against the cot with his legs crossed under him; there isn’t enough room in the centre of the floor to straighten them out. He pulls on his blood-brittle socks. The back of his head is touching Lhundup’s thigh. He’ll know if anything changes. Sleep seeps into him as if through a saline drip, and through him also a sadness circulates, sadness flecked with dread. Up at base camp it had been going so well—he and Sophie were having fun, on their own and together. Now he has vanished into another crisis. Her warm, noisy girlhood, maybe it has come to seem to her like an elaborate hoax, the upbeat trailer before a sombre film. He did crisis postings then, too, but would return for longer and be relieved when he did. Those loving scrums on the arrivals level at Pearson; on long road trips, the customary songs, the ritual repartee. A family is its own small country and culture and he has been displaced from his, just a marginal participant in its constant, necessary renewal.

  He seemed to cope well enough in the aftermath of Bosnia, where he’d once counted spinal columns—all that remained after a shelling—or Rwanda, where he’d dashed in off the bloody street, not having noticed his latest soaker, and left crimson shoeprints in the clinic corridors. But each posting marked him until a part of him was indelibly soiled, a ghost that leaves bloody shoeprints everywhere it goes. Meanwhile his own world felt less and less like a refuge: an alien culture of complacency, ingratitude, the petulant expectation of ever-increasing comfort and plenty. It grew harder to spend time with oblivious friends, except at loud, frenetic social events, infused with booze. And then Nika, of all people—she too slipped gradually out of reach. Now it’s only over here among the doctorless that he still feels he matters, belongs. He returns “home” now only for the children, and there too there’s a distance, though you expect that eventually, even with your own kids, who belong less to this wounded adult world, you hope, than to the world to come.

  Well, let it come.

  Before she sinks below the level of dreams, into that hard, paralytic state akin to coma, Sophie dreams she is sitting on her feet by the river, conversing with a small eddy by her knees, where a greenish froth like frogspawn revolves on the surface with the trapped, eternal current. It’s the dead border guard and they are speaking in a tongue that’s neither English nor Mandarin nor anything else she can name. There’s no face or human feature on the eddy, it’s just a part of the river, yet it has a voice, cool and fluent—a soft, hypnotic monotone—and Sophie is moved by the words, which she understands somehow. She and the dead guard are speaking the language of all waters. He is sad but resigned to this latest karmic mutation, he doesn’t blame her at all, and she promises to return to the shore and talk to him again after nightfall.

  For some minutes Amaris has been awake and staring through the bars of her cell at the green-painted steel door at the head of the hallway. Faint coughing, shuffling from behind it. It’s like a bulkhead door in The Battleship Potemkin, but with a lateral slit in the steel at eye height, and that’s where she keeps her gaze, unable to tell if anyone is staring back. She sits cross-legged on the fold-down cot, still in her parka and with the cell’s one blanket shawled around her. The blanket, pocked with cigarette burns that look like bullet holes, smells faintly of urine, tobacco, jasmine. A heavy stench wells from the hole in the floor with chilly drafts. She has sloshed a full bucket of rusty water down the hole, to no effect. Still, she’s breathing in as deeply as she can, exhaling slowly, fixing her eyes on the door.

  It cracks inward. She draws herself up, lets the blanket fall, folds her jumpy hands in her lap. You’re on.

  Zhao emerges in an officer’s peak hat, a green tunic with small epaulets, a black belt and holster. Behind him the door eases shut with a hydraulic sigh. He flicks down his cigarette and pivots his toe on it slowly, neatly—all his motions have a weary grace—then walks past the side corridor leading outdoors and stops in front of her cell.

  “You are not asleep, Miss McRae.” Under the horn-rimmed glasses his eyes are puffy and his doughy, morose face looks waterlogged, too large for his rounded shoulders. “Is this private cell not comfortable?”

  “You can’t expect me to be sleeping peacefully.”

  “How you sleep is not vital. Only that you sleep enough so that we may talk.”

  She says, “Have you ever slept behind bars?”

  His gaze holds steady, but his right hand slips behind his back.

  “I’ve just learned something about it,” she says. “Even when you’re asleep, you never forget where you are—that you’re trapped. It colours everything, even your dreams. If you want to talk to me, if you want to hear what I have to say, you’ll have to let me out of here.”

  “I have been waiting to talk to you.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up, so I can use the telephone. Or the Internet.” Calm is impossible now, but men can be fooled; she taps her triathlon watch, keeping a fix on his eyes, her heart gunning. “I mean, it’s twelve thirty. I expect you’ve had some calls about us by now.”

  “We have been having some minor…disabilities with our satellite connection. I have no idea why. And it is three p.m., not twelve thirty. I see that the sergeant did not take your watch.”

  “Three p.m.?”

  “The Tibet Autonomous Region is on Beijing time. So is all of China for this matter.”

  “What about your land line? I saw telephone poles out there.”

  “Before the telephone, we must speak with each other.” He talks softly, almost intimately, his mouth close to the bars as if to avoid disturbing the others down the hallway. How she would love to scream now, to see him flinch and retreat, his grim face fragmenting. “First, though, I shall speak with the doctor. But tell me, Miss McRae—what do you know about his daughter, Sophana, or Sophie?”

  “Sophie! So you have had calls. When did she call?”

  “I am posing the questions. Please soften your voice.”

  “It wasn’t a question. I’m saying…I’m trying to tell you that the outside world is on to you now, so you should realize it’s time to—”

  “These threats, Amaris McRae, they are a waste of our time!” He can handle the paired r’s in “Amaris McRae” with no Charlie Chan fumbling, but he says the names with a slight sneer and he’s straining to keep his voice down. “You may answer my questions here, or you may answer in Lhasa. Or perhaps both. I think, both. We must conduct a proper investigation. I’ve not yet had time to study most of the tape in your camera.”

  “You’re being careful, I hope—you know how to use it?”

  His thick brows converge above his glasses. “I am not some kind of…barbarian.”

  She holds herself in.

  “I’ve not always lived in this wilderness,” he says. “And as you’re indifferent to a private cell, I shall ask the sergeant to place you in the main one, where the doctor chose to go. You will find it crowded.”

  “Look, I offered to join him in there, to help him!” If there’s anything to ignite Amaris, it’s a moral critique, direct or implied. “He insisted I’d be in the way in there.”

  “You were not more tempted to show solidarity for the Splittists, like him?”

  “I’m not even sure I know what a Splittist is.”

  “A rebel.
A dissident.”

  “I prefer rogues to rebels.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I find rude minds more interesting than high minds. They’re less phony—less judgemental. Have a look at one of my shorts, online, and you’ll”—for a moment Zhao recoils, blushing heavily, and she almost laughs—“one of my films, online, and you’ll see what I mean. Have a look at the tape in that camera!”

  “Amaris!” she hears Book call warningly. Zhao’s head snaps toward the voice. Somehow he wrings more of a scowl out of his face. He turns and walks back toward the steel door, a hand fisted at the base of his spine. His soft torso sways with anger; his boots on the concrete step primly, soundless as slippers.

  The steel door closes behind him.

  “Amaris…are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “You have to stop baiting the man!”

  She opens her mouth to yell back, fresh fury rearing—Book, after all, is the reason she’s stuck in this open toilet of a cell—but she doesn’t. (At the back of her mind, something nibbles away: they might have seized her for filming the attack even if Book hadn’t crossed the border.) She draws a breath, holds it deep. Her adoptive parents were professional activists, or so she came to think of them, who would issue constant little corrections and ethical lessons and parables, as well as “invitations” to demonstrations and marches. Their oceanview house bristled with joss stick bouquets fuming in casually syncretic shrines—Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, whatever—and posters of Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela and, yes, the Dalai Lama. Her older stepsister’s room, populated with portly little buddhas, exuded fogs of sandalwood and patchouli. She papered the walls of her own seedy bedroom with anti-idols: Patti Smith toppling off stage, Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets, Kurt Cobain wearing kohl, John Singleton filming Boyz n the Hood. Phil and Naomi, her first-name parents, tenderly lectured her on the hollow glamour of nihilism, its long-term karmic costs. The break came when she was home for reading week in ’92 and refused to sign a petition against the latest bombing of Iraq, not because she was for the bombing but because she had developed an anaphylaxis to worthy causes and knew it would hurt them.

  But think of them now! At home in North Vancouver, one eye on Newsworld or CNN, scouring the web, blogging, granting telephone and TV interviews like the old pros they are, they will be less alarmed than beaming, teary with pride at her involvement—and alongside a doctor without borders, the kind of engaged helper they would have loved for her to become! Mar has definitely experimented a lot over the years, but we’ve always known she was willing to step up when it really counted. We are so proud of her! Their fists shooting up in a suburban power salute. Free Tibet!

  She has to smile at the irony: the publicity will do wonders for her films, which are utterly apolitical—except in the way they sometimes point out hypocrisies in the politically involved.

  She calls out to Book, “So did you hear all that?”

  “A bit. I woke a few minutes ago.” He sounds bothered by this admission, tired. He speaks softly, though a number of the Tibetans are clearly awake now, talking among themselves.

  “I think Sophie must have called here,” she says.

  “I thought I heard you say her name…you really think she called?”

  “I think she must have.” And she adds, “She must be worried sick about you.”

  No response. Of course, what could he possibly say back? He probably thinks she’s baiting him now, though in fact she’s thinking of how she would feel if her own dad were in trouble like this.

  Her parents are ridiculous, but she loves them.

  “How’s the wounded man, Lew? The nun?”

  “Holding their own, somehow.” Pause. “I have to get back to them right now—please be careful, okay?”

  Still sitting on the cot, she sips cold dregs from the mug of tea dispensed a few hours ago with this rock-hard parody of an energy bar. When she shifts position, air wafting from under the collar of her parka brings a vinegary smell, the acrid sweat of stress. When this is over, she thinks, and it will be over soon, Amaris, what will you do, girl, when this is over? A steaming, leisurely, scented bath, bergamot or rose, followed by a slow, languorous shaving of the calves, though she barely ever needs to, the creamy glide and faint burn of the razor, the silken salve of the almond oil after. Then dressing up. Mexican turquoise earrings and impractical shoes—slingbacks in the same semi-precious hue. A teal clutch. Her favourite summer dress (officially it’s fall now, but in Toronto it’s still summer: big cities generate their own dome of weather)—a wispy A-line with a halter neck, espresso-brown on her golden shoulders. Going out with a friend (she has many, none really close) or on a date with a man with an intriguingly louche grin, stubble with a touch of grey, imperfect teeth, maybe to Rodney’s for oysters with squeezed lime and wasabi and thick-crusted Italian bread, fresh greens. She can taste the greens, the rocket and radicchio, the acid tang of the dressing, lemon juice, burnt sesame oil! With ice-cold beer. Or a classic martini, gin, desert dry, two olives.

  Sex with somebody new. No encasing commitment; no derailing pain.

  A metallic clatter and she opens her eyes: the woozy wardroom green of everything. That bulkhead door swings in and Palden snaps into the hallway as if striding up the runway of a fashion show. His cheeks and eyes shine. He sports a dark green beret, navy sweater, camouflage pants tucked into polished boots. He has strapped on a new weapon, a tiny snub-nosed machinegun that looks like it should squirt water. His giant sidekick follows with a ring of keys. “Hello, Amaris!” Palden hails her as he passes. “I see that you are meditating like a nun!”

  Palden’s hold on Book’s arm is friendly. His other hand clasps the grip of the little machinegun, its muzzle next to Book’s spleen. “I am happy for this chance to practise my English,” he repeats, leading Book through the steel door at the head of the hallway and up a narrow corridor lit by a bare bulb. Book, after years of postings, is bored of asking people where they learned their English—there are always more interesting things to ask—but now he takes his jailer’s cue. Delighted, Palden answers, “Oh, after high school I was a bellhop in the Lhasa Howard Johnson, then tourist guide in the Potala Feudal Palace, for groups of American and British tourists. But always I longed to enrol in the People’s Army, to be part of such an important thing—and here I am!”

  To think this affable fanatic may have killed one or more of his own people yesterday.

  They enter a large, stuffy room with a window giving onto the fenced yard. It’s a small window and the high desert’s focused light burns in as if through a magnifying lens. Beneath the window, a barrel stove with a kettle on top, socks slung on a line above. There are cots along the wall and on one of them a man in a white T-shirt and camouflage pants sleeps, turned away, his brushcut skull knobbed and ridged. Above him, a large map of Tibet barbed with stick pins like a voodoo effigy. Another soldier slumps in a chair, his thumbs prodding at a small object that cheeps in his hands. It looks like a Tamagotchi. A third soldier sits at a desk by a door on the far side of the room. He looks too small and junior for his cigarette—it’s the boy who blew a kiss to Sophie when the Chinese were up on the glacier, rectifying their border. The huge telephone in front of him blurts and the boy smiles shyly at Book and nods and picks it up.

  Palden leads Book past the boy, opens a door and extends his hand as he must have done a thousand times while showing hotel guests into their suites. “Through here, please,” he says, adding in a stage whisper, “Hope it goes well, Lewis! Please be helpful, please. Be seeing you …”

  The cubicle is smoky, windowless, lit by a pair of buzzing fluorescent tubes. Zhao sits very straight behind an old hulk of a tin desk, stubbing out a cigarette. His thick black hair is side-parted and combed. He looks older without his glasses, the pouchy little eyes red and raw.

  “Sit down, doctor.”

  Book has readied himself to be firm but civil. He knows his own temper in the face of injustice; he
knows antagonizing Zhao could deepen this emergency, for everyone.

  “Thanks, I’m fine. We need to be fast here.”

  “Sit down and it will go faster.”

  Book sits on a plastic folding chair that wobbles under him. It has been placed by the door—which is slightly open—some distance from Zhao. On Zhao’s desk are his glasses, a thick laptop computer, a black hardbound sketch-or ledger-book, and a pushbutton telephone, one message-light pulsing.

  “I won’t waste our time, doctor. I know you will want to return to your patients. Would you care to take a cigarette?” He half stands and leans and holds out the packet. Empty. Book senses that this tease is not deliberate. The overhead light deepens the morbid sacs under the man’s eyes.

  “What I need is a washroom,” Book says. “To wash my hands, for one thing. And we need to get those patients to a hospital.”

  Zhao sags back into his chair. “You may use my own WC when we are finished. This interview need not occupy more than a few minutes. Please simply tell me the truth of what you were engaged at, up on the border.”

  “I work with InterMed—it’s a crisis response outfit based in Canada—but right now I’m a doctor for a climbing expedition—base camp staff. And I brought along my daughter. You’ve been in touch with my daughter—with base camp?”

  “We’ll speak of this shortly. First, though, your colleague, Miss McRae, she has urged me to investigate her work via the Internet.” He nods toward the open laptop screen. “This has taken somewhat longer because of satellite problems—but now, what do I discover? That the subject of her very last documentary is a strong sympathizer with the Dalai Lama!”