Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  Diki’s head, in the black felt cap, lifts and droops again.

  Poor Zapa has been hit, but the only sign of the bullets lodged in his heavy rump is his thirst—he’s been drinking and drinking from the small pool a little deeper in the grove. Sophie can see him through the trees. Light flaring off the water. She should be longing to drink and rinse her face in that same cold water (she assumes it’s cold) and now feels herself doing it, over and over and over and over, clear Georgian Bay water, a scent of warm resin, and she wakes up, lifts her head, her instincts tingling. Her father, Choden and Amaris talking softly behind her. Lasya’s chuba is down now, covering her. Her husband and Dechen sit with her and the baby, its weirdly thick black hair spiking out around the blanket.

  “I’ll be half an hour,” her father is saying. “I’m just going down to the copter.”

  “You’re not thinking, Lew.” Amaris’s voice has gone parched and small, as if she’s old and dragging an oxygen tank. “They must be dead. And if they’re not, they’ll shoot you. They already tried, remember?”

  “Might be someone I can help, till the soldiers come. They’ll be coming soon.”

  “Another reason not to go.”

  In her sensible, melodic voice Choden says, “If another helicopter arrives, Lewis, or an aeroplane, you’ll not have time to get back up the…the slope there.”

  “I won’t let you go down there without me,” Sophie cuts in.

  “Sophie!” He sounds surprised, caught out. “You okay? There’s tea now. You want some tea?”

  “If you’re going down, I’m going too.”

  “Let’s not go through this again,” he says. “You’ve got Diki to care for.”

  “If you’re going off again, I’m going with you!”

  “Sophana, listen…Goddamn it.” He comes out from behind the tree and glares down at her, then squats with a low grunt. A sunbeam floods his dark face, shrinking his pupils, yellowing the spoked green around them, so the lenses seem foreign, probed to the roots, nothing solid showing beneath. Where is he? She’s losing him, or he has lost himself. He should never have picked up that gun. He told her once that he last held a gun as a teenager—his dad’s “vermin Cooey,” whatever that was, for foxes and groundhogs at the farm. He never meant to use another gun on anything.

  “I followed you before and I’ll do it again,” she says through jittering teeth, weak to the core, but committed.

  “She’s got you, Lew. You can’t leave us.”

  “Will you stay out of this?”

  “What, you think this is a private matter,” Amaris cries, “a nuclear family thing? There’s nothing private now! Forget it. That’s over. We’re like a…we’re a group here, Lew, okay? No one’s separate. You’ll endanger the whole group if you go get yourself captured, or killed.” She stops and coughs hard and Sophie thinks, Just shut up. You’re right, but just shut up and let me do this. In a softer, hoarser voice Amaris adds, “We don’t want to lose you too, okay?” and now Sophie sees deeper into her father’s eyes: he’s hoping somehow to revive the helicopter crew, the ones he helped kill—to unkill them—and maybe return to who and what he was before he picked up the gun. And it hits her with a cruel spasm under the breastbone: there’s no returning, no bridges back.

  Tenzin yells something from the boulder in a shaky voice. Sophie looks up. For the first time the healthy colour drains from Choden’s cheeks, and her father sees that too.

  “You’re right,” he mutters, as if talking to himself. “You’re both right again. I’m not thinking clearly. Can’t do the triage.” He looks up over Sophie’s head to where Amaris and Choden stand. “Choden, how long do we have?”

  Tenzin’s stressed voice comes again and Choden listens with her bristly head cocked to the side and a hand raised for quiet. In the near-silence before Choden translates, Sophie hears a droning, like the sound of a distant generator, brought by the wind.

  “Mr. Lodi says…it’s a very large object flying at us. A large aeroplane. He thinks it means to land on the, on the plain, beside the lake. And he thinks there may be also vehicles of some kind on the far pass, coming down into the plain.”

  Her father growls something under his breath.

  “Mr. Lodi says they can be up here within two hours.”

  “We’ll have to start once the placenta comes,” her father says, standing suddenly, as if revived by the latest crisis, as he would be—that’s how he has lived his life away from his family, from Sophie, hasn’t he, thriving on crisis? Maybe that’s his fuel, his drug, even more than lively social events are. “Should be any time. She’ll have to walk somehow. I doubt the yak can carry anyone now.”

  “You know how much farther it is?” Sophie asks Choden.

  “Mr. Lodi hasn’t travelled this route for some years, but he thinks a day or two.”

  “We should all go fill up with the water,” her father says. “And the skins—they’ll probably freeze, but fill them anyway.”

  Amaris has said nothing since hearing that she’s right, as if she thrives too much on conflict to know what to do with agreement. Maybe that’s her drug, Sophie thinks, getting a flash-vision of a world of oblivious adults, all with clashing addictions.

  Amaris hunkers down beside Sophie and her face crimps with pain. In her damaged voice she tells Sophie, “Here, let me hold her now. You go to the pool first.”

  “Could we go together?” Sophie asks. “Dechen wants to hold her,” she adds, giving the child a light squeeze. “I don’t want to go anywhere alone right now.”

  There’s stormy-looking cloud right overhead, but out of the clear skies to the southeast the sun still burns and by the pool among the trees its rays are hot. The air is cold. The pool has the warm, turquoise hue of a cove in a tropical holiday brochure. Into its icy water they slide their morgue-white feet—Sophie’s long and thin, like the rest of her, Amaris’s stumpy, the toes impacted, as if they’ve been bound since childhood. She never liked them. A scent of smoke comes through the bitter pines. Each summer Phil and Naomi would take her camping near Whistler and she always hated it, missing the city and her friends, but she’d give a lot to be camping there now, a child again, fed and protected. They’ll be losing the sun before long, fleeing deeper into the mountains. She stands up, quickly strips down while the injured yak watches through its black bangs from the far side and then drops its head to lap at the pool with its giant lunchmeat tongue.

  “You’re going in?” Sophie says.

  “You too,” Amaris insists, and this reassertion of her orderly habits, this bathing in a battle zone, must be a good sign. Surely if you don’t expect to survive, you don’t bother. Sophie wades in after her, but she clambers out fast and turns away, shy, of all things, even here and now, after what they’ve gone through, while Amaris stays hunched and aching in the pool, sucking air through her teeth, chafing her body with both hands for warmth and also to scrub away this place, this journey, her fear of dying.

  She gets out, drying her skin with quick, gingerly dabs of her balled up T-shirt, as if somehow to soak up the water and yet keep the fabric dry. Through chattering teeth she says, “What’ll you eat first—first night back in the city?”

  “You mean Kathmandu?”

  “No—back home.”

  “Spaghetti,” the girl says in a reverent murmur. She’s still turned away, shivering, the fine braids twitching over the back of the turquoise necklace as she wraps the chuba around her. “In olive oil. With a spicy tofu tomato sauce. Tons of Asiago grated on top and melting.”

  “Tofu? Something Asian after this? Not Greek?”

  “And my yiayia’s feta salad. And a huge slab of galactoboureko.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Custard in phyllo pastry.”

  Sophie turns to face Amaris, who’s still dabbing, trying to hurry. Sophie says, “And in another year or two I’ll have my own little place downtown, and cook for myself and my friends and drive around on a Vespa and write songs an
d graphic novels. And I’ll work at a food bank, and wait on tables, and I’ll start some courses at OCA and maybe go full-time the year after. And I’ll visit home for dinner, like, once a week and we’ll have big noisy Greek dinners the way we used to all the time, and we’ll all be there.” Her blue eyes shine out of deep, bruised pockets, under straight, strong black brows. This is the longest stretch of personal information she has offered in Amaris’s hearing. Not information, though—invocation, a spell cast on the future.

  Pulling on her tights, Amaris says, “You’ll have to come to my place sometime. I hate cooking—we’ll order in. It’s a small place but the ceilings are high, and the light…it’s fantastic in the fall. And the bathroom is huge.”

  “I’d love to,” Sophie says earnestly, as if she has forgotten where they are and what’s happening. “I mean, just to talk to someone older who’s actually an artist.”

  Across the pool, two of the young monks are kneeling to drink and fill water skins. Amaris suspects they’ve been watching her and the girl, though their eyes are averted right now. She couldn’t care less.

  “You must miss your camera,” Sophie says.

  “I keep thinking how much less dangerous this would all look through a lens.”

  Sophie’s hopeful look deflates and Amaris is angry at herself for breaking the spell. It’s her professional reflex—force people to face cruel truths. Young innocents especially. She’s sick of her reflexes. Still, the girl recovers fast, lifting her hood into place, pulling on her parka and zipping it up with a determined expression. She looks older than when Amaris first met her in Kathmandu, but that change is nothing compared to how much older she acts.

  “If I ever had a kid, a girl,” Amaris says quickly, “I think I’d give her your name. I love your full name. It’s Greek, right, ‘Sophana’?”

  “Khmer, actually.”

  “Khmer? It doesn’t …”

  “My dad heard it when he was working with refugee kids on the Thai border, a few months before I was born.”

  Pause. “Did he get back in time for your birth?”

  “He was on his way. I was, like, three weeks early. Bad timing’s just been our luck.”

  The soft-footed Choden appears without warning, a ghost in glasses. “We’ll have to set out quite shortly,” she says. “Lasya is ready now. And the soldiers…Really, you two, bathing in water like this surely isn’t safe! Please, be careful. My tutor, he was always wanting to bathe, even in cold water, and he caught ill and he had to go home.”

  As Amaris and Sophie follow her back, they exchange a stunned glance: an army is coming for them and Choden has just warned them of the dangers of a cold dip. She leads them through the raking boughs and needles of the pine grove, avoiding the faint trail where Norbu’s body lies. In the sun-stippled clearing the party is gathering, Lasya already on her feet, her striped apron scooped up above her waist and tied somehow at breast level, creating a womb of wool where the baby nestles. Lasya looks only a little drawn, a touch pale, as if after a long day of housework.

  Tenzin shouts something from his lookout. Amaris’s eyes—the only real lenses she has left—impel her toward that spot and she ducks through the thinning, shrinking pines while Lew, behind her, calls her name. She speeds up. As she nears the lookout, Tenzin rises, turns and starts toward her, wearing aviator shades, his strained, handsome face speaking, but she points ahead: “I have to see what’s there, okay? I have to look.” He seems to get it. He turns again, an armed chaperone, and walks the few steps back with her. From the pocket of his sheepskin coat he takes a pair of tiny, ancient binoculars, almost like opera glasses, and hands them to her.

  In the middle of the plain, some distance away, a big-bellied army-green propeller aircraft sits, windowless except for the cockpit. It must have brought the soldiers who are now trotting toward the base of the crag, where the helicopter lies, sending up a long coil of char-brown smoke. The soldiers are spread out like a patrol, maybe fifty strong, maybe a kilometre short of the helicopter and the base of the zigzag path that will lead them up here. By the salt shore, the yurt is a gusher of flame with oily purple fumes coursing up. Beside it, a pile of something burns in that same furious way, and with a surge of nausea she thinks bodies—human, animal?—gasoline or something has been poured over everything and now beyond the flames, distorted by the heat, more soldiers appear, running back toward the main body of men. Now is when she needs the camera. As they burn the evidence. “Don’t worry,” Lew startles her—he has come up from behind her, his hand lightly bracing the small of her back—“the people got away. But the soldiers must think they helped us. We heard them shooting the animals. They must have lost it, seeing the helicopter.” She doesn’t reply; her voice seems shattered. She nods her head, even surer now that he was right to act, almost glad for the brass hulls of the casings glittering around her boots, the twisted debris of the helicopter there below them.

  In the distance beyond the airplane, coming fast, a motorized convoy, a dozen Jeeps or maybe ATVs trailing a wake of grey dust.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Tenzin says in Tibetan. She understands him fluently now. As the situation gets more extreme, the range of things anyone might be saying contracts to a few urgent universals, like on the inside flap of a pocket phrasebook. Help. Fire. I’m lost. I’m ill. Get the doctor. Hurry. Please.

  They file up a path through the dwindling pines, the walls of the ravine closing in as if they’re climbing into a trap. From high above, somewhere in the clouds, an aircraft’s muted snarl. The ravine ends at another heartbreaking, dam-like slope with a faint path slaloming upward. Before starting up, Book glances back: near the base of the ravine, where Lasya had her baby, charcoal haze rises like a mist in the trees, with little flares and fingers of orange light. For a moment he thinks somehow he’s seeing the fires down on the plain beyond—the burning yurt and the pyre of animal corpses—then understands, the small forest is burning, and with it Norbu’s shallow, pine-duff grave. No smell of smoke; the west wind is sweeping it out over the plain. Book catches the eye of Tenzin, who is bringing up the rear, his thumb hooked under the strap of his shouldered rifle, a cigarette in his tight lips. Tired eyes, almost swollen shut. He plucks the cigarette from his mouth and tosses it down on the scree as if to show Book how he ignited the fire.

  Book lets him pass, then stoops and picks up the butt and hungrily inhales.

  From the top of this latest slope they stand panting, watching the fire chew its way slowly up the ravine. Choden seems close to losing her superhuman composure. Her watching face stays impassive, but a tear flows out from under her glasses and down her plump red cheek. Besides the poplars and the fruit trees of Tyamtso, these burning evergreens, who knows how old, are the only trees they have seen in this desert. And their shelter saved the fugitives. Sophie weeps openly. Lasya squats, her eyes tightly closed, arms folded over the still bundle on her belly and chest. Again the hum of a surveillance plane, though there’s no sign of the pursuing troops, who must be staying back, out of the smoke. But the forest is sparse and the fire won’t last.

  Everyone adds a stone to the meagre, prayer-flagged cairn, even Amaris in her sunglasses.

  They follow an ancient stream bed curving to the northwest and on through a much broader, deeper valley walled in by prodigious peaks, their frozen upper reaches merging into cloud. A few icy pellets of snow spatter down. No more trees, no sun, nothing growing here, it’s as if they’ve journeyed a few thousand miles north in an hour, into the Arctic. The Tibetan survivors, in their heavy skin coats, with brown, stoic, bone-stretched faces, look more than ever like their distant cousins, the Inuit.

  Nobody speaks, every face folded low out of the wind. Book walks behind Sophie and Amaris. He’s struck by how well Dechen and Lasya are keeping up, then decides it’s just that the rest of them are slowing badly. The yak is limping, favouring its right hind leg. Diki, slumped on her father’s shoulders, keeps coughing herself awake. That line from som
ewhere about the solid, unkillable children of the very poor—whose is it? In Book’s experience poor children are consummately killable, by any number of things.

  They rest for half an hour in the lee of a boulder that must once have smashed its way down the ice and gravel flank of the mountain above them. Strings of prayer flags run from the top of the boulder to the ground, but the flags are in tatters, their dyes washed out to a sameness of grey, the inscriptions scoured clear by the snows and the sandpaper wind.

  Next to him Sophie says softly, though not so carefully that others can’t hear, “I love you, Papa.” The Papa comes out garbled. Her lips are too numb. He doesn’t dare try out the words himself—he will break down—but just squeezes her hand and looks away.

  He creaks over to Lasya, trying to hide his condition, and through Choden he asks her how she feels. Deep shadows now under Lasya’s liquid eyes. Somehow they make her more beautiful, like a saint after a long solo vigil, or visionary fever.

  Choden translates her two or three sentence answer as, “Pretty well.”

  “And the baby?”

  Lasya looks expressively at Book as she speaks with halting effort—her lips and chin, like Sophie’s, must be numb—then turns to Choden as the nun translates, louder: “Nursing already, sleeping and nursing.”

  “Good, good.”

  “But, Lewis…how are you, yourself?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He knows exactly what she means.

  “It isn’t in your nature, Lewis, what you’re after doing—what you did back there. You’re a healer, in your heart. But I’m sure you must have thought you must.”

  “I didn’t think at all,” he says heavily. “You don’t think I had to?”

  She studies him through lenses that seem like magnifying glasses, burning into him. Those enlarged eyes—the whites so clear and unpolluted—make him feel old and disgraced at one glance and like an ignorant child the next. Lasya eyes him as well, then there’s a muffled mew and gurgle and she looks down and rocks her hidden baby.