Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  In the sloping light they file out over the stubble fields and start up the far wall of the valley. They’re still climbing when they hear the soldiers arrive—a dozen ATVs snarling down the dry wash across the river and pulling up on the beach, where a tideline of prayer flags lie strewn. Men, tiny at this distance, dismount and seem to gape up at the white pier or down at the river, where the remains of the severed bridge lie tangled, twitching in the shallows like the bones of some huge slaughtered thing.

  They hike over a cracked gravel plateau where tumbleweeds roll toward and past them. Though they’ve gained Sophie, Tenzin and a large black yak panniered with supplies, the group is smaller, having lost Sangye, Lhundup, Palden and Pema. So besides the additions, the group now consists of Choden, Book, Amaris, Norbu, the nun Dolma, the three young monks, the widow Dechen, and Sonam, Lasya and Diki—fourteen people and a yak.

  It’s been days since they’ve seen more than wisps of cloud in these desert skies or over the mountains, but now, above Kyatruk, maybe thirty kilometres to the west, thick shoals of cumulus are massing. The sun has set behind the mountains, but its light still shines on the towering clouds, changing them by degrees from golden to resin to henna-red. Kyatruk’s peak-pyramid darkens to a silhouette. Amaris wonders if Wade might be up near the peak right now; if so, he’d better be on his way down. Still, she would feel safer up there, on his controlled, artificial adventure, than she does down here as a refugee.

  Stars appear and keep appearing, thousands of them, and for another hour they droop along over the dirt or scrunch across gravel, gradually uphill. It doesn’t feel gradual. The food and drink and the villagers’ warmth have helped Amaris recoup some strength and solidity, but she’s coming apart again. Up ahead, the Tibetan family walks, the squat child chugging along between her parents, arms splayed out to hold their hands. Between them and Amaris, Book and Sophie walk side by side, hands clasped. They’re like a smaller Tibetan family—he in an earflap cap, sheepskin coat and ornamental-looking black felt boots (gifts from the villagers, who didn’t appear to have much to spare), Sophie with her hoodie and parka over the Tibetan dress and a turquoise necklace—another gift. Amaris still wears polypropylene layers and her state-of-the-art parka and toque, the lone remaining North American, a racial irony that should be more amusing, but in these clothes, and seeing Book and his daughter paired off, she just feels excluded—more alone now, as if the past few hours of connection were a cruel tease. Did her parents, refugees in their last hours, ever feel this alone, tired, scared? As usual, she bolts the crawlspace door on further speculation.

  Tenzin, their new guide or leader, leaves his yak at the head of the line and strides back among the others in his olive gumboots, a cigarette in his mouth. He hands around a leather skin of water and jabs a long finger ahead toward the mountains, speaking in a lispy, excited tenor that doesn’t fit his sexy outlaw’s face. He asks Sonam something, then hefts Diki onto his shoulders and lopes back toward the head of the line and transfers the child onto the yak’s back. The animal halts, peers over its shoulder through thick sheepdog bangs, showing the prayer flags and white scarves on its horns. Tenzin ropes the child on by the waist and claps the yak’s woolly rump. Sonam and Lasya walk on either side, each reaching up to take one of Diki’s hands, a picture from a folk tale or Bible story.

  Beside Amaris, Choden appears, padding silently in her red sneakers. “Are you all right?” she asks in that soft, disorienting accent.

  “I think it’s true what they say—you get used to anything.”

  “You’re feeling a tad stronger, then?”

  “No, I mean it feels normal to feel tired and scared shitless. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Choden’s eyes, just visible through starlit lenses, now vanish as they do when she smiles. “Oh, I think it’s an interesting way of putting it.”

  “No, I mean because you’re…you know.”

  “My English tutor, Jim Garrity, he’d say ‘shite’. It isn’t a bad word here. Just part of the life, really.”

  They’re almost whispering, Amaris muting her voice not only because they’re on the run but also because the starry sky, this stupendous special effect, imposes quiet.

  She asks, “Will Palden be all right back there?”

  “Sure he will. Until the Chinese come. Tenzin Lodi is quite respected in the village—his father was a famous resister—and he told the others not to hurt him. Now, the Chinese may be harder on Palden because of what happened up at the jail. Then again, they do love having Tibetans in the PLA, and they mayn’t want to lose him. By the way—we know your descent is Han, and you ought to be a little wary of Norbu.”

  “Shouldn’t we all be?”

  “He seems to mistrust you.”

  “One day I’m spying for the Dalai Lama,” she says, “next day for China.” After a pause, she pushes on, quietly, “You know about Lew’s confession yet?”

  “Sure—he explained when I was helping with the wounded. It was a good idea of his, I think, but then Norbu turned to violence.”

  “So, you’re sure there’s nothing in it?”

  “In violence, you mean?”

  “No, in his…in what he, uh…it doesn’t matter for now.”

  “His confession? I doubt so. The man’s eyes don’t have a lying look, do they? Oh, and about Norbu—please don’t take it to mind. He’s young, just twenty.”

  “God, I didn’t think he was that…grown-up.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so either,” the nun says, almost sharply. “There aren’t so many grown-ups anywhere, when you think of it.”

  “Outside the nunnery, you mean,” Amaris says with a hint of her old edge. “Among the unenlightened, like me.”

  “No, I do mean anywhere.”

  Ahead at the base of the Himalayas there’s a mirage, a small copy of the mountains, slopes and rifts and peaks starlit ghostly white like a dim hologram floating far below the original. At first she thinks it’s a range of snowdrifts, then realizes, dunes. She’s talking again, not looking at Choden but at the far dunes and, silhouetted against them, the small child swaying up on the yak’s back. “My parents were refugees too. For a few days. In Vietnam, after Saigon fell. I was adopted by a family in Canada, as a baby.”

  “Ah. You never knew those first parents?”

  “Nobody knew anything about them, at first. My adoptive parents thought I was the child of peasants, probably from a bombed village. Napalmed. Or that’s the story they settled on. That’s how it happens—first you’re probably the child of bombed peasants, then the probably gets dropped and everyone forgets. The village got promoted to a heroic Vietcong hideout attacked by the marines—Lieutenant Calley types. Then some information leaked out. Some people got out of Vietnam in the mid-eighties. I was about twelve then. Turns out my parents had been ethnic Chinese, which was no big deal, no issue at all, but they’d also been involved with the South Vietnam military. Wasn’t clear how, but I guess it didn’t involve uniforms. Maybe they were in propaganda. Or they were agents of some kind. Interrogators, even. I hope not. Maybe they were just liaisons, with the Americans. It’s not important now. I really don’t care anymore, and I’m not flying to Vietnam like some of my friends still urge me, to pick up my parents’ scent and make a, a self-involved documentary…award-winning film…daughter returns to find her dead parents, her lost roots, herself, whatever.”

  She pauses for air, light-headed, the plateau slowly climbing. It’s like trying to talk while pushing yourself on the treadmill. Breath blossoms around her.

  “But I wonder now. I mean, what was it like for them? Just for the time it took till the end. We were with a big group, I guess, in a motorcade of Jeeps, cars and taxis. It would have been really hot. The road was muddy, it got jammed up with bombed trucks and cars, and we got stuck. Okay—probably I wasn’t there with them. I mean, I just wasn’t. The kids had all been sent ahead, a few hours or a day ahead, and they, the kids, they made it out to the coast
. Big orange school bus full of orphans-to-be, little faces pressed to the windows—that’s how I used to picture it. But in my mind, I wasn’t on that bus. I saw myself with my parents, in a stretch limo—a limousine—with a rosewood bar, and I’m older, not a baby and there’s root beer and peanuts for me, and comic books, and a chauffeur in an officer’s cap. Beats the real story, or what’s left of it—my parents and the others trying to catch up and the road’s totally blocked. All of them looking at their watches, yelling out windows, trying to ram their way through. Knowing we’re up the road and we’ll be going aboard—we—I see a little sister beside me too—and sailing out, any time.”

  Amaris snorts softly, as if in mild disdain.

  “Your kids slipping away and you’re gridlocked while MiGs strafe the road.”

  The stars are closer up here, by three or four kilometres, but they seem light years closer, the entire sky a Milky Way.

  “Sorry—God—I hate when this happens.”

  “You mean when you tell about your …”

  “It’s not because of them—it’s me—I just feel so weak. I mean, no one gets worked up like this except for themselves, really. That’s what it comes down to.”

  “But you seem quite calm, Amaris. It is a sad story.”

  “You’re really nice,” she says. Then, after a few seconds: “Phil and Naomi—my adoptive parents?—I don’t think they ever quite forgave me for being the spawn of the dark side. Allies of the imperialists. It embarrassed them, some way they couldn’t admit to. Me, I don’t take sides now. I couldn’t care less. In this corner, wearing black pyjamas, a mob of homicidal idealists…in this corner, a puppet regime of crooks, pushers, profiteers. It’s all bullshit—politics, opinions. Phil and Naomi started watching me, the bad seed, for any sign of reactionary instincts. Any break from the party line. When I was, like, twelve. They didn’t even notice they were doing it, these people who thought they were so enlightened, so rational! What’s funnier is the profs I dated, the wine and cheese radicals who got all ethically stressed when they heard about my pedigree. Because that’s when I used to ‘share my story,’ as they say. Just like you’re supposed to.”

  The white dunes are nearing. Choden seems a bit lost, nodding vaguely, her dimpled smile taped on. Amaris says nothing of her ex-fiancé, with his love of agitprop and political montage, who kept doubling back to her story, sure she needed to return to Vietnam, to “work out the karma” of her loss and of her parents’ presumably evil careers. How she broke it off two days before the wedding. Hardest thing she’d ever done, till then. But afterwards it got easier to do stuff the community recoiled from and she came to wear her ostracism like a badge.

  No. (Is something a lie if you don’t say it out loud? Say it to yourself, at least.) She’d delivered herself to him unconditionally, made a hostage of her whole being, surrendered her irony and her toughness and her cutting, unhappy smile, hoarding nothing in reserve, so when the engagement died she seemed to lose her better self along with Emil; she was orphaned, as if for the first time. Drunkenly, piously in love, she’d told herself that marriage would be her new nation and she’d swear out citizenship for life and raise her hand to recite the oath and learn the anthem by heart so she could sing it way better than the lazy, longtime citizens who always fudged the words and hardly even moved their lips. She would put her hand over her heart and sing. Then abruptly it all collapsed—there was an earlier love he’d thought he was over and now he realized, of course, he was not—so that he, in the end, broke it off as much as she did.

  No. For once in your life, be honest about love.

  He, Emil, broke it off, against her pathetic pleas, and their shared little myth of a country dissolved and vanished from the map of her future, and it’s unbearable, now, to recall such naive faith. That you can belong to any country but the private one you create for yourself.

  Cold consolation: she’d vowed to out-achieve him and she has.

  As they walk, Choden’s bare hand finds Amaris’s gloved one and after a moment seems to transmit warmth right through the fabric. It does help. It helps a lot. They’re side by side but it’s as if the nun is ahead and guiding, half towing her up the grade of this dead plain toward the base of those dunes, now silvered by a rising moon. She’s glad the two of them are at the back of the line. This generous connection aches like loss.

  Book and Sophie are nearing the top of the steep range of dunes, feet sliding back with each step almost as far as the step has gained, when he hears faintly, over the shunt of his pulse and his redlining breaths, a choppy drone. The Tibetans in their ripped layers and cheap sneakers are stopping, turning to look back, their faces lit up. Book and Sophie turn too. The moon is high and its light makes a rutted Martian plain of the hours of hardpan they’ve just crossed, while in the skies over Tyamtso a smaller, white-hot light descends like a landing module. As it disappears now, swallowed by the distant valley, the stuttering of the rotor grows louder, amplified by the valley’s bowl. A brilliant dome of light glows in the sky above it, like a stadium lit up for a night game.

  One by one, the fugitives turn their faces back toward the slope and struggle on.

  Descending the long backslope they enter another world, a vast, chiaroscuro desert of rolling dunes white as snowdrifts in the moonlight. It’s cold enough for snow, too, though Book is roasting in his sheepskin coat, which he peels back off his torso so it droops from the waist sash in the style of Tenzin, Sonam and Lasya. The yak plods stolidly with the child on its back, her parents beside it. Book catches up and asks Lasya how she feels—Choden translating—and then notices, half-hidden among the panniers, a saddle scabbard with the stock of a rifle showing. He shakes his head. In Tyamtso, Norbu urged Tenzin, Sonam, Book and then, in desperation, the monks to carry Sangye’s machinegun, or one or more of the captured guns; the kindly-faced Sonam unhappily agreed, but Tenzin spoke in a low, forceful voice to Norbu and the extra guns were left behind, to be turned over, along with Palden and the captured guard, to the Chinese. Good decision, Book felt. Better to show the Chinese—and before long the world—that the refugees were little threat. Though Norbu has clung to his own gun, and now Tenzin has brought a rifle.

  Choden tells him that Lasya is feeling quite strong and there’s still no cramping.

  His last moments with the wounded in Tyamtso were rushed—he thought the noise of the villagers destroying their bridge was the sound of fighting, till Choden came in to explain. Lhundup’s diastolic reading was up to 64, almost normal, and there was strength in his grip as he grabbed Book’s sleeve and urged him, in Choden’s words, to flee with the others at once. The old village doctor had already changed the dressings over Pema’s wounds and fractures with foxed gauze and weakly adhesive surgical tape that might date back to the time of the Tibetan resistance. The result looked messy, far from antiseptic, and Book redid it under the pretext of checking for more lead and bone fragments. He left the nun four codeine tablets and careful instructions. The village woman, shot through her stout thigh with no vascular or bone damage, had already checked herself out of this ad hoc ward—the front room of Karma’s parents’ house—and Sangye was sitting up on his cot, breathing shallowly, wincing with each sip as he drank rancid butter tea. A bullet had cracked one rib and deflected clear; a second bullet had pierced him just under the left clavicle, missing the lung but grazing the bone and likely causing a hairline fracture, Book couldn’t be certain without an x-ray. He left the kid a half-course of Clindamycin—almost all that remained—and the last of the codeine and more instructions, which Choden relayed to the old Tibetan. The Chinese doctors would have to complete the course of drugs and they would act professionally, Book felt sure—and not only because the authorities would now want to minimize Tibetan losses, with the world tuning in. Finally Norbu twitched into the room and Book raised his hand, then signalled firmly Leave the weapon out there. The kid growled something but complied and came back in and put his forehead to Sangye’s in the trad
itional Tibetan greeting or goodbye, while their hands described some kind of gang salute and held a long fist tap.

  Another hour and old Dechen replaces Diki on the yak. While Book and Choden confer again with Lasya, Sophie takes Diki’s hand and the child peers up and gabbles at her in her Alvin and the Chipmunks voice. Sophie, as if understanding, nods down with a fondly amused look on her beautiful face, which Book can actually see for a change, her hair back in braids and the hood of her sweatshirt off. For a moment he glimpses his daughter as a young mother and his heart seizes. She always was compulsively maternal. As a small child, if no doll was at hand, she would nurture almost anything. Once he found her in the garage, humming lullabies to a dirty oil filter he’d just removed from Nika’s Opel.

  He takes her free, mittened hand.

  “I think Diki’s asking me when we’re going to stop,” she says, and he guesses she herself wants to know when, but doesn’t want to seem weak by asking.

  “I’m not sure, love. Tenzin has a place in mind. Maybe a couple more hours. The villagers, they’ll send the soldiers the wrong way, but we’ve got to keep moving.”

  Her hand, at first grudging, gets a better hold.

  “Papa, your patients back there—they’ll be okay, right? Without you?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it.”

  He might not be so confident in other circumstances, but these are Tibetans and something toughens them. It’s their expectations, or lack of them, he believes. Unfortunately he has almost exhausted his antibiotics and codeine; out here, in an emergency, there won’t be enough left for any of the fugitives, including Sophana.