Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  He checks his own fastening, as if it matters now. As if a Lawson could blow it that simply. He’s not thinking either. He too relegated to dementia.

  He must be near the peak, keeps thinking he’s reached it in the whiteout, but it keeps receding as he shuffles on, testing the corniced snow with his axe. He can’t seem to turn back. Gusts colder, scudding through his skeleton. Three p.m. The light fainter. There is no light, no dark either, just static grey. A Lawson doesn’t quit. He stops to pant, hunched over the cane of his axe, decades older. His shivering calms. Maybe this is it. At times a man feels closer to ghosts, a long-dead climber, a brother, a dead baby, than to the living. No expectations…no reproach…ghosts are easier to love, like dogs.

  Hell, I’m not just going to disappear! I can do fourteen one-arm chin-ups!

  The ridge levels off, falls away, and it’s the peak, he believes—then he dimly sees the slope continuing upward on the far side of a kind of notch in the ridge. Doesn’t seem to belong here. He climbs down snow-covered rocks and there’s a cave in the far wall of the notch, creamy stalactites of blue ice almost blocking its mouth, and maybe, his mind whispers, this is death, this silent gap in the journey, with soft powder snow falling slowly, shyly around him.

  There in the cave, as he kneels on the threshold, he finds Murloe.

  At midnight the refugees reach the pass. It’s marked by another cairn of flat, piled stones. A few dozen ravaged prayer flags, on ropes radiating from the top of the cairn to the ground, thrash in the icy wind. The Tibetans pause and add stones to the cairn—Diki contributing a pebble—while the monks and nuns mutter monotone chants. Sophie solemnly adds a stone and Book has to look away. Amaris doesn’t participate in the simple ceremony but she watches with respect, it seems, as if it’s the funeral of a stranger.

  When everyone has passed, Book adds a stone of his own.

  They descend onto a plain lapped in by low, steep, snowless mountains that grow larger toward the plain’s western end. Beyond it, Kyatruk and the higher Himalayas must be lost behind that huge, moonlit firewall of cloud. By two a.m. they come alongside a lake, which must have filled the whole plain at one time; its wave-torn waters are lit in flashes, the moon beaming down through shreds of fast-moving cloud that bring occasional squalls of snow and hail. Book walks on one side of Lasya, her husband on the other, Choden beside Book to translate. Book can’t make out if the stolid Lasya is in true labour yet, and this is no place to stop for a cervical exam, assuming they’d let him do it, which he doubts. Through Choden, Tenzin says they will climb another pass on the far side of the plain, above which there’s a little pine forest in a valley where they can rest. Tenzin keeps repeating a heavily stressed phrase, which Choden now gently translates: “Mr. Lodi would like us to speed up a little. He fears we’ll not be sure to reach the pine valley by dawn if we don’t speed up.”

  In fact they’re slowing down. The yak, with Norbu still slumped face down on its spine, a blanket bound over him, seems tired as well. Now and then Lasya will stop and hunch over slightly, her eyes closed, lips compressed. Like Amaris, she has a strong chin, a slight underbite that somehow completes her beauty. Skin so clear and smooth it seems stretched like a drum-skin over her bones. Her mate Sonam watches her with grave concern. He could be her father now—his greying hair and sparse whiskers seem greyer, his puckish, laugh-lined eyes stricken and grim.

  Book keeps glancing back to check on Sophie—she and Amaris holding Diki’s hands on either side—and to scan the horizon for signs of dawn and pursuit. Just before five, light starts infiltrating the landscape and their route becomes clear: up ahead, the lake and the plain end, meeting a high crag like a large decaying dam. Cutting down into the crag is a broad notch that a waterfall must once have carved. From the floor of the plain to the base of the notch, a trail seems to zigzag up a fanning ramp of sand or scree.

  A light appears by the lake, off to their right, but it’s faint in this twilight and Book asks Choden if she can see it too. “I’m afraid I’m the last one to ask about that, Lewis,” she says. She calls to Tenzin, who replies in his thin, lispy tenor, a cigarette wagging in his lips. Choden says, “He believes it’s the hut of a nomad family, Lewis. There still are some in this part of Tibet, where nobody ever comes.”

  “Can we stop there? Give Lasya a rest?”

  “We can’t, alas. We’d be welcome, of course, but Mr. Lodi makes the point that if the Chinese learn the nomads have helped us …”

  “I’m not thinking straight,” Book says, angry at himself.

  They turn away from shore to swing wide around the light—a butter lamp, he sees now, in the doorway of a yurtlike dome, a number of animals staked around it, small yaks or ponies. Better to leave the lake anyway. It’s torture to drag along beside it and know the water is undrinkable, salty, Choden explains, like all these desert lakes.

  The sun below the skyline behind them now casts its red light high onto the clouds crowding the Himalayas to the west. As the fugitives veer back toward the lake, completing their detour, two squat men wearing yakskin robes emerge from the receding yurt as if stumbling out of a quantum wormhole. One slowly lifts a hand high and there it stays.

  Lasya is deep in labour now. Waves of pain squeeze moans out through her tight-closed lips. She’s shuffling, trying not to stop. Norbu soon wakens on the yak and looks wildly around. Roughly Tenzin helps him down and points ahead and then up: the high crag is almost on top of them now. They lean into a fan-shaped slope of scree. Switchbacks climb it to the base of the notch, where a few small, sentry-like pines stand waiting. Zapa looks too big for this trace of a path but his hooves pick their way nimbly, almost daintily, Dechen hanging onto his tail with one hand, bent double as he half tows her upward.

  The echoing roar of an aircraft fills the plain. It comes scooting low over the shore, a glass bubble body and damselfly tail—a small recon helicopter, not the arc-lit monster that landed last night by the ruins. Tenzin yells in a high, cracked voice; Choden calls, “He means faster!” The exhausted climbers now find a grotesque, spasmodic energy, lunging up and around the hooks of the trail, Book behind Lasya, glancing back to check on Sophie, who’s pulling Diki by the hand, Amaris following. Diki makes little hiccupping sobs as her short legs chug upward.

  They’ve climbed into pink, descending sunlight—now maybe the wine-red of the nuns’ and monks’ cloaks won’t flag them all against the grey of the scree. So far the helicopter doesn’t seem to see them. Banking steeply it buzzes the nomads’ tent and there’s a megaphonic blaring, not “Ride of the Valkyries” but a bombardment of distorted, staccato words. Lasya has sagged to one knee, groaning low in her throat. Book’s hand is on the small of her back, pressing—“It’s okay, we’re there, come on!”—while half the party jams up behind them. One of the monks panics, shortcuts up across the hook, loosing a small slide of gravel and sand. Book is about to tell Sophie to shortcut, too, but now Lasya is up again, moving. He squints back across the plain—the helicopter trying to land as the pilot fights to keep the nose up, the air too thin here even for this small craft. Must be over 15,000 feet. Book panting, pushing Lasya gently from behind. His guts are churning. He needs another pill. Down on the plain, a hatch opens and two tiny forms in camouflage gear duck out and run toward the yurt. Now he picks out movement beyond the yurt, on the east side. Several figures—from here he can’t be sure how many, three, four?—are already fleeing on their ponies, galloping away along the salt lake, dust rising. Sophie bumps into Book from behind and he grabs her hand and pulls her and pushes Lasya with the other. The receiving line of small trees stands just above. The older nun, Dolma, is wheezing and flushed. “Go, go!” Book hears himself, pushing Lasya harder. Tenzin is near the top, hauling the yak by its nose-ring lead. Book glances back downward: the two soldiers emerging from inside the yurt and hunching low as they run back to the helicopter. They will either fly after the escaping nomads or come for the refugees that they must be aware of by now, expos
ed on this wall with the sun brightening.

  Tenzin stands between two dwarf pines, the weapons over his shoulder, reaching his long arm down to help people over the top. He grips Book by the shoulder of the Tibetan coat and Book can feel his strength. Tenzin hauls Sophie, too, then sweeps up Diki and plunks her down behind a boulder. A different world up here: stunted pines receding up a long, narrow ravine, like a high valley in the Rockies. Down on the plain the helicopter is trying to take off, nose lifting but then dipping too far as it lurches forward, almost scraping the ground. It banks toward shore, using the gradual downslope to gain height. Over the lake it climbs, Book urging it to turn away, disappear, but now it tilts and wheels around steadily and flies right at them. “Everyone down!” he says just as Tenzin shouts something, unslings the guns from either shoulder, then gapes down at the machinegun as if stunned to find he’s been carrying it. Everyone falling back into the trees—“Farther!” shouts Book—and crouching under the boughs.

  The yak is a problem. Tenzin prods it with the rifle and it trots a few steps along the faint trail into the pines but then stalls, glancing over its shoulder, conspicuous as a Jeep. The helicopter comes barnstorming out of the sun. It will barely clear the notch. Book crouches between Lasya and Sophie and he pushes down on Sophie’s nape until she’s prone on the needle carpet under the trees. Seen through branches, that bubble of glass hurtles toward them, not thirty feet above, and he gets a flash of a woman in a pilot’s cap, gripping the stick—a fortyish face, rigid with attention or terror.

  The pea-green belly and tail streak overhead.

  “Did they see us, Papa?”

  “Not sure. Don’t worry, love. They can’t land in here.”

  In a winded voice Amaris snaps, “They’ve seen us, Lew—Jesus, they’ve seen the yak, you think they’ll think he’s a stray?”

  Tenzin thumbs a long cartridge into his rifle—a bolt-action hunting rifle, old but cared for, the breech sleek with oil. Ducked down in the trees, no one can see the helicopter but they hear it juddering back toward them, the sound murderously amplified by the walls of the ravine. Book glances at Lasya, now on her hands and knees, head down, panting, her many long braids hanging to the ground. Sonam at her side. This stand of little Christmas trees, filled with orange light, will be her maternity ward. Book has helped deliver babies in even worse conditions, in Kigali, in Pristina, though he can’t recall ever feeling so exhausted.

  “Lewis!” Choden beside him, raising her voice as the helicopter nears. “I’ve brought your kit.”

  “Thanks—right.” Wake up.

  Choden cups a hand around her mouth and shouts in his ear, “Mr. Lodi would ask you to take the small gun! I do hope you won’t.”

  “I’m delivering a baby.”

  “Sure he doesn’t want Norbu to hold it, but Norbu is, ah—what’s the word—he does demand it.” Book looks back: the tall man and the smaller one standing on the trail behind the yak, their arguing drowned out by the helicopter’s roaring.

  “I don’t want it,” Book shouts, “and Norbu can’t have it. He’ll fire on the copter and they’ll shoot back.”

  “Tell them to get down!” Amaris calls.

  Tenzin lifts a knee—his hands hold the two guns—and kicks with his lanky leg. The gumboot topples Norbu down into the small pines. Tenzin turns and runs to the lip of the notch and crouches behind the boulder there.

  The helicopter snarls overhead, back into the sun above the plain.

  “Lew, let me help now!”—Amaris crawling over—“just lying here’s impossible!”

  “If you could just keep Diki clear. The baby’s coming fast.”

  “Papa, they’re flying back!”

  “What…? Don’t worry, love, they can’t land up here. They won’t shoot.”

  “Why are they going so slow?”

  Book bends to study Lasya’s face. “Choden? Ask her if she—”

  A pine cone above Lasya’s back explodes like a small, silent grenade. The earth in front of Sophie’s face erupts with little geysers of needles and dirt. Then the sounds—a stitching of shots. Book leaves Lasya and flings himself down on his side, blocking Sophie’s head. Amaris has thrown herself over Diki and now tucks the child’s exposed, squirming arm beneath her. Book glances over his shoulder, through the pines. The copter is turned broadside, edging along the lip of the notch, two men firing through the open hatchway, and Book sees that most of the shots are lopping boughs and chipping bark around the yak. They’re trying to kill Zapa, to slow the escape, but the copter is wobbling badly, bullets spraying everywhere. Tenzin replies with one shot; it sounds like the crag has split open. Norbu is up, still drunk on Diazepam, weaving toward the boulder, and now he yelps and falls on his face as if he’s tripped over a root. He doesn’t stir. Needles and twigs and cones rain down on the huddled fugitives. Book curls closer around Sophie. Useless—a bullet would pass right through him.

  He’s up and running stooped through the low trees on pumping, anaesthetized legs and he tucks in behind the boulder next to Tenzin, who fires again. The helicopter floats there, the sun behind it filling the clear bubble with red light. Someone in the hatchway is down but there’s more wild shooting. Tenzin grunts something, coolly reloads. Book watches his own hands pick up the machinegun and the steel is black and cold as a bone-saw. In stop-motion he flicks what must be the safety, cocks the handle, lifts the muzzle. The gun convulses in his hands. He sprays wildly, blinded by the sun, and he keeps on firing till the violent palpitations cease and Tenzin cracks the air with a last shot and Book can hear and see again: the sky emptied except for the sun, the helicopter crumpled down there at the base of the crag, its tail rotor gently turning. No explosion. He blinks away tears of rage and grief, looking urgently for any sign of life below them, besides the far-off, receding dust trail of the nomads. The rotor slows to a stop. The rising sun has lit up strandlines around the lake—concentric rings tracing the lake’s shrinkage over time, from full and fresh to salt-bitter.

  Sophie sits in lotus position with her back against a pine tree, deeper in the grove, Diki slumped in her lap, asleep. She’s trying not to move and wake the child up. She’s too stunned and numb to move, though now and then a hand, a foot, a shoulder twitches. In the dappled light her father kneels by his open medical kit, rubbing an antiseptic wipe between his hands. His eyes don’t blink or shift or seem to know she is there as they peer through glasses at the pine duff around his knees. He goes on rubbing his hands, absently, almost violently, as if trying to stop the shaking. Now he removes his glasses, swabs his face, cleaning off flecks of Norbu’s blood that could pass for his own blood, his own wounds.

  The birth seems almost a small thing now. Not much for him to do. Lasya is still strong and things go quickly. She squats, her chuba and apron hiked up around her waist, her arms extended, one of them around the trunk of a pine, the other over the shoulder of her husband, who kneels beside her and whispers in her tiny, scarlet ear and doesn’t react now as she snaps back at him. Sophie, a dozen steps off through the trees, can tell she’s biting back her louder cries, as if the soldiers are close enough to hear. Her cheeks and her exposed, blue-necklaced throat flush red under the brown skin and the flush deepens in waves with her moans and now the top of the baby’s head shows like a large, bloody egg. Sophie has never seen a birth except in a high school video, yet she’s numb to this one. A death, a birth, another death. In her shock she seems unshockable. Norbu, struck in the chest, lies maybe twenty steps away, his face and torso covered with his baggy parka. His legs in the loose skateboarder jeans and basketball shoes stick out like after a gang shooting. Before coming to Lasya her father tried to save him, swearing as he stanched and clamped the wound, and Sophie had to look away, knowing it was too late, even for her father, he would fail, fail, fail, blood seeping with each desperate chest compression, leaking during the mouth-to-mouth. She’s trembling unstoppably. Diki doesn’t wake. Dolma and the monks chant in their throats around Norbu
’s body—Om manipadme hum—and Choden tends a small fire, heating water. Amaris furiously, rapidly snaps sticks for the fire, her lips quivering. Tenzin, out of sight through the trees, stands guard behind the bullet-chipped boulder at the top of the notch.

  Her father still looks stunned. He won’t be able to act if needed. But when the baby’s smeared, elongated face emerges with the worm-blue cord looped around the throat, he hooks a finger in to loosen it and receives the baby as it slithers out in a purple clump. Silence but for the funeral murmur of that chanting. Her father, moving fast now, hunkers between Sophie and the baby, doing something, and she thinks, Another death, what could be more natural—then a high wail needles through her head from ear to ear. A few moments and her father backs away on his knees: Lasya lying on her open coat with the baby, wrapped in a grey blanket, crying on her chest. The cord still runs between them like a rope between climbers. Lasya’s chuba and apron remain hiked up. Between her spread legs she looks wounded and raw, but even this view can’t make the dazed Sophie flinch, though she does seem to be sobbing, without tears. Choden bustles over with cloths and a too-small bowl of steaming water and her father glances back at Sophie. “A boy,” he mouths, trying to smile with his glassy red eyes, as if hoping to comfort her.