Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  When the shooting starts in the village and its echoes spread through the valley, Sophie is crouched low in the mustard and she freezes there, unable to rise and look. It’s hard to remain still while your heart is bolting and impossible to think clearly, but two thoughts arrive to rattle through her brain: he would be disappointed that she would cower down here while her helpers, her saviours, are being massacred, which must be happening, they must be refusing to tell the border guards where she’s hiding—and at the same time he’d want her to stay concealed, not endanger herself. Would want her to survive. This second thought seems an even stronger argument for action. She raises her head through the mustard blooms. The shooting goes on. Up on the far bank of the ravine, where she came down last night, small figures are moving, flashes of purple—monks or nuns—and others with them. Pilgrims and travellers must be coming to the village. Maybe for some reason the guards are firing up at them instead? Now she sees that one of the travellers is firing down toward the village.

  She runs back out through the bitter field on painful bare feet, her legs numb as if she has been sitting on them for hours. She runs past the sulphur spring, now deserted. Maybe it will help if she appears in the street—the white girl. Then she remembers she’s dressed like a villager. But she has to help somehow. She has made this thing happen.

  The shooting finally dies out. She approaches the back of the village. Her view of the ravine’s far bank is blocked by houses. She runs up a cold, ammoniac alley of dirty whitewashed stone, scattering a clutch of chickens, who flee past her. She comes out into the village. In mid-street a villager lies on her back, others crouched around her. It’s a woman in a pink blouse and black chuba—not Karma. Karma stands in the doorway of her house and she’s barricading her peeking children inside. Under the shuttered window, Tenzin sits on the back of a Chinese guard whose face is squashed into the dirt, where Tenzin holds it firmly. A young guy and an old man sit on the guard’s lower back and legs. A brown mastiff lies writhing nearby, trying to get up. Its hind legs seem stapled to the dirt. Villagers slowly emerge from the houses and look warily up and down the street.

  At the head of the street, on the cairn-like landing of the bridge, her father is kneeling over another guard—she can see the blue cap on the man’s head—doing chest compressions so violently it’s like he’s finishing off the loser in a street fight. Amaris and a nun stand behind him on the swaying bridge, gripping the hand ropes. Downstream on the other side, Tibetans kneel on the beach, drinking from the river.

  Sophie stands trembling, trying to take things in.

  Her father totters to his feet, slowly shaking his head. He still hasn’t seen her. The boy who led her into the mustard field runs up to her—he has slipped past Karma’s barricade—and takes her hand, and now Sophie leads him quickly up the street, past the knot of villagers helping the hurt woman to sit up, past the silent, flopping dog. At any other time, she would stop to help. Her father hobbles barefoot down the stairs of the landing and toward her, squinting in her direction. He stops. The medical kit falls from his hand. Behind him there’s a brushcut nun in thick glasses, along with Amaris, whose face is a tight, frozen mask, like she’s had a stroke, but now her mouth opens, she whips off her sunglasses and cries, “Lew—it’s her!” Sophie tugs her hand free of the boy’s grip and runs toward her father. There’s blood on his sweater and his hanging hands. His green eyes are soft with tears, something she has never seen before, tear tracks scoring down through the grime on his dark face, which looks a dozen years older, and he’s scolding her in a raw voice but she can’t hear him because she’s shrieking, “What the fuck were you doing, Papa, why did you do that, why did you leave me up there, I just, I just, I fucking hate it when—why do you just forget about me all the time!” And she slaps his cheek as he yells that he told her to stay up there, stay up there, it’s goddamn lucky she’s even…his voice collapses, then he repeats, “I told you, just stay!” She slaps at him again but pulls the blow short, then punches his chest with a loose-clumped fist while reaching for him with her other hand, trying to embrace him while he reaches for her, too, and she punches him again and tries to keep scolding and her voice crumples and she’s left sobbing limply in his arms.

  THREE

  WHAT LOVE REQUIRES

  Think this way of the fugitive world:

  A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

  A flash of light in the summer clouds,

  A phantom, a failing candle and a dream.

  —from The Diamond Sutra

  Whoever loves being alone must be either

  a beast or a God.

  —PLATO

  In 1959, thousands of Tibetan monks forswore their pacifist vows to fight the People’s Liberation Army, which had been occupying Tibet for almost a decade. One group of monks—the survivors of a PLA siege of their monastery, situated on a hilltop in western Tibet where an army base now stands—retreated down a dry streambed and hid in a cave where a Tantric monk of regional renown had once fasted and prayed. For some months the fugitives emerged by night to raid Chinese camps and ambush their patrols, as the physical-spiritual discipline they’d developed in the monastery was quickly, almost seamlessly, rededicated into habits of guerrilla stealth and aggression—a border that proved easy to cross. The monks were effective fighters. Yet in the evenings they still meditated, chanted and prayed.

  In September 1960, with a PLA company closing in on their hideout, the surviving monks fled west down the streambed toward the River Khiong. Reaching it, they crossed one of the oldest rope bridges in Tibet into the village of Tyamtso, where they seemed a wondrous sight with their bullet bandoliers and shouldered rifles and bloodstains, in the form of darker spots of the monastic purple, showing on their over-robes. The villagers gave them food and blankets and directions and a guide so that they could flee and try to cross over the Kyatruk Pass into Nepal, from which they might continue to make raids.

  Once the six monks and their guide and his yak had climbed out of the valley, the villagers gathered around the pier of the rope bridge. Two of the strongest men, carrying axes across their chests, filed up the steps with a slow, stately demeanour, like executioners mounting a dais in preparation for a royal beheading. Some grand and awful, necessary act. They stood on the pier with their heads bowed, seeming to bear on their shoulders the weight of history and collective fate. On receiving the signal, they swung their axes at the heavy ropes that generations of hands had held to cross the bridge into Tyamtso. At first they chopped hesitantly, as if hoping the order might still be stayed and the victim spared, but after a few strokes they set their jaws and attacked the bridge with a strange new fervour—great, walloping blows—severing the two ropes at the same instant. Groans and cries rose from the small crowd. Yet the bridge hadn’t fallen: the footboards were not only slung from the hand ropes, they were also secured to the pier—not strongly enough that someone could still have crossed the bridge, but enough that the hanging arc still held. So now the men hacked through these final ligatures. A helix of tangled rope, footboards and prayer flags folded into the river and washed downstream a short way until stopping, still fastened to the pier on the other side, the footboards bobbing, red prayer flags rippling in the shallows like eddies of blood.

  So the villagers kept the approaching Chinese from crossing the river and capturing the monks. Eventually, when PLA reinforcements arrived with inflatable boats and got across the Khiong into the valley, they burned the unharvested barley and millet and mustard fields, and a firing squad shot three village elders for helping the monks to escape.

  In the winter of 1961, the villagers set about rebuilding their bridge, receiving, to their surprise, some help, along with emergency rice rations, from a PLA military unit stationed nearby.

  When Tibetan resistance in the region ended and the Chinese unit finally withdrew, the villagers again festooned the hand ropes of the bridge with prayer flags.

  September 22, 3:49 p.m.


  THE ONE THING HE FEELS lucky about is that this mild, clear weather is holding. And that up here on the Lawson Wall, where he and Tashi are completing their setup of the fixed ropes, he’s not at leisure to answer his radio. In fact, he has asked Kal not to patch through any calls until dusk, when they should be back down at Camp Three.

  This system of ropes is now all but superfluous. The master plan was for Lawson to free-solo the wall (he still means to do it) by attacking a gorgeous, near-vertical stretch about fifty metres west of the fixed system, while Amaris, edging her way up the ropes, filmed his climb. Jake was to go ahead of her, Zephyr to trail her, to lend a hand if necessary. Tash and Mingma were also to be on the ropes, with Ming, the sirdar, going first.

  But Lawson’s solo wasn’t meant to be a mere vanity video—a way of proving himself, yet again, to the world. He really does want to climb Kyatruk purely, the way Murloe must have, if he ever got this far, which frankly now seems impossible: the wall’s striated limestone is flaky in patches, and in shaded spots it’s slick with verglas, a thin, treacherous glazing of ice over rock. The conditions facing Murloe might have been different, but even on a perfect day this cliff could take a few rounds out of an expert, let alone an impetuous amateur like Murloe. Amateurs are always impetuous. Or else, terrified into timidity. Both extremes will kill you.

  Now it’s possible that only Tashi will use the fixed ropes, and only because Lawson will insist, so that Tashi can get some photos of Lawson’s solo. Jake Kravchuk is a maybe, at best, after his fall at noon. It wasn’t a terrible fall but at this altitude, with everyone visibly deteriorating, it might be enough to end his climb. He was insisting on helping attach the ropes, instead of resting at Camp Three as Lawson suggested, and then he asked if he could lead one pitch and Lawson foolishly agreed, gratified, maybe nostalgic, to see somebody on this expedition show some guts and will-fire…. Lawson’s old man had served in World War Two, seeing action in Italy and “taking a wound” (Lawson now guesses it couldn’t have been a very bad one, since he had no visible scars and nothing like a limp). When he’d brought his sons to Nelson in the early ‘80s, Joe Lawson had looked around and scratched his red, sun-freckled crown and told Clyde and Wade that something peculiar was happening to men. They were all going AWOL. Down some hole into history. But being an optimist, if a somewhat grouchy one, Joe Lawson felt that this unaccountable desertion presented an opportunity—a gap to be filled by the few. Real men on the hoof would soon be as hard to find as honest real estate brokers and he told his boys to remember that. Wade Lawson carved it on his heart. Taking commerce at university—he was the first Lawson to attend university—his confident talk, exotic ruggedness and post-weekend climbing tans made him stand out. He grew accustomed to deference. He failed to realize that his classmates’ interest in him was basically anthropological. Mouthy little drinking pals he had to bodyguard, girlfriends who thought him too rough-edged (he now assures himself) to bring home to their folks, which he would have liked, frankly, since he himself had become, for lack of a tougher term, orphaned, the old man having rolled his Cherokee off a mining road on the way down from the hunt camp on Sheep Creek.

  Everything has come out wrong. The soft men of the world have slipped their keyboard-pecking hands onto all the important levers and Lawson’s own approach just seems to put folks off. He wonders what his old man would have made of some of the mild young guys who come to the Lawson Climbing Gym with waxed or lasered bodies—and now even shaved armpits.

  Jake was thirty feet above, laboriously hammering in a piton, and Lawson, on his belay stance, didn’t like the look of Jake’s left foothold. A puny nub, black-iced with verglas. Jake seemed to have all his weight on the front-point and two toe-points of his crampon. Lawson spat out his gum and was opening his mouth to call up when Jake’s cramponed boot slipped, spasmodically kicking. He was coming off. He made no cry. Lawson tucked into the wall while yelling down at Tashi, “Below!” As if plunging down an elevator shaft, Jake fell straight, feet first, past a chocked anchor lodged in a crack, then bounced to a stop two body lengths above Lawson, who was wrenched upward, scraped into the rock. Jake groaned something through his oxygen mask and lay dangling against the wall, not even reaching out to secure himself or place his feet.

  “Jake? Don’t trust the protection—get yourself on the wall. Jake!”

  He responded in slow motion, gloves weakly pawing.

  “And try to be more fucking careful, okay?” The words welled out of Lawson. A stint of hard breathing, then he managed to add, “Anyway, uh…that pin looks solid. Good job on that. You hurt?”

  “Maybe.” Jake had lifted his mask but his voice still seemed muffled. “Right knee’s starting to throb. Couldn’t feel it for a second there. Suit’s torn over the knee. There’s blood.”

  “Okay. Listen up. You’re going to have to rappel down, get back to camp. Uh, Tash can go down with you…if you need the help.”

  “I can get down all right.”

  That’s the stuff. “You sure?” Lawson was already reaching for his radio to call Shiva, at Camp Three, to come to the bottom of the wall and wait for Jake, walk him back to the camp and boil water and clean his knee and get a baggie of snow on it. “You’re the doctor now, Shiv,” he said into the handset, shaking his head in disgust. “Over.”

  That was two hours back. Now the job is done, Lawson driving two pitons into a perfect crack on the ledge above the wall. Finishing, his head awhirl as if cartoon birds and stars are orbiting it, he stares up at the peak of Kyatruk, some thousand vertical feet higher, a spume of snow jetstreaming off the tip. What a magnificent rock. His rock. From here it’s a forty-five-degree slog up the summit pyramid to the top, though not a safe or easy slog, since the last approach is along an arête—a razor ridge of probably unstable, corniced snow, especially dangerous in winds or whiteout conditions.

  He needs just one more day of good weather. Just one. In fact, a few lens-shaped clouds are sailing in from the north—quite a number, in fact—but he thinks maybe he can see more clear weather in the offing beyond them. Clear skies or blue clouds, it’s hard to tell. (His mind suspends further speculation.) He stares at the ledge where he has just fixed the rope to the anchoring pitons and clipped in. There’s something odd. He lifts his goggles and squints through the glare. Reminds himself to keep breathing. For some seconds he has been staring at an animal hide, partly snowed and frozen into the ledge.

  Tashi calls up to him, “Lawson Sahib?”

  “Just a minute!” And he whispers, “Jesus, look at this.”

  “Sahib! I think maybe we go down quite soon. All will be dust soon.”

  Dusk, he means. It’s true. Lawson half turns and glances down the mountain. Tashi’s bulbous goggles, far too large for his bony little face, peer up like those novelty-shop glasses with goofy eyeballs on the lenses.

  “There’s something up here,” Lawson calls. “Like an animal. Dead.”

  “An animal, Sahib? A bird? Is it a gorak bird?”

  “No, I mean…uhh. Like a goat hide…it’s …” It’s Murloe, obviously. That heavy sheepskin coat his Tibetan guards gave him. It must be. I’ve found him.

  “I think, Sahib, maybe you need to be gassed a little?” Tashi looks up with his merry, gap-toothed leer, the wall plummeting away below him. “Me also, of course! We all need the gasses up here! I think tomorrow, for the final climb, we must all be—”

  “Shut up, Tash,” Lawson calls down as he gets his knee onto the ledge and crawls toward what looks like the sheepskin-coated back of a man—Albert Murloe—who has curled up, his face into the slope, exhausted or maybe injured after his heroic amateur climb. The Murloe Wall, Lawson hears himself think: its true, earned title. Unbelievable. The poor bastard did it.

  Lawson removes his overmitt and reaches with his gloved hand, gingerly touching the bleached hide. It crumbles like the shell of a songbird’s egg. Lawson recoils, shuddering, as spindrift snow sifts from the hole like sawdust from a dummy. A
lump of something appears beneath, almost poking through the hole, and for some lurching pulse-beats Lawson sees it as a blackened, ossified heart. Then he realizes it’s part of the mountain—just rock. He prods gently at the parchment sheepskin and more of the rock juts through. There’s nothing under this skin but rock and snow. This is just Murloe’s coat. As if he slept here under the sheepskin, then went on up the mountain without it, to save weight. Or discarded the coat in a hypothermic delirium and maybe didn’t continue upward—maybe just turned and walked the other way, off the top of the Murloe Wall, by accident or to cut short his pain.