Every Lost Country

by Steven Heighton

  Now Sophie knows this ravine, remembers gazing up its length from below, even exploring its lower reaches on a mild, windless day with Kaljang, in another season, another age. The slope turned out to be wrong for the snowboard, too gentle, sharp rocks just under the snow. (She was playing with a snowboard.) How many nights has she been gone? She can count just a few. Four, five—it seems impossible. They’re going to make it. She’s going to get him down. Now base camp comes into view, her own little tent, Kaljang’s tent, Wade’s toasty control tent. She shudders so intensely she pees a little.

  She glances over her shoulder at the mist and cloud still filling the upper part of the ravine. The soldiers must have given up. She hopes they all make it back. Something catches her eye—the top of Kyatruk is sheathed by a dark twister of cloud, but between that high storm and the clouds choking the upper part of the ravine is a long, white, sunlit slope with a few islands of jagged rock gouging up through the snow. Near the bottom, not far above the ravine, something red and yellow gleams among the rocks. She knows that pattern of red and yellow. She stumbles, not watching her step as she looks back over her shoulder, trying to work it out. Tashi’s parka. Tashi, the class clown—it must be—of all people. She can’t believe he’d fall. She thinks she must be wrong. She’s about to tell her father, who’s aiming the binoculars down toward the glacier, when she hears a pulpy thud and his knees crumple and he drops, slumping forward onto his face. She looks at Amaris, at Choden—nobody sees. It’s a slow-motion dream where everyone but her is stunned, slow and doesn’t react. Her father trying to rise as if he’s done a long set of push-ups and is straining for one more. A ragged red hole in the back of the coat. The machinegun has slipped off him and lies in the snow beside his stethoscope. The crash of a shot billows up the valley.

  She runs and kneels and rolls him toward her. “Papa!”

  Distant cries fill the ravine, and Sophie, fearing another shot, squints down at the glacier and makes out an officer beside the boulders, yelling at several men with large rifles. The sun has moved into its notch between the peaks west of the mountain, its molten light spotlighting the border and the valley as it shines down the glacier at the same angle it shone when she first saw the Tibetans fleeing toward her, five days ago. Five years ago. Others coming to help her now, Amaris, Choden, the monks. Her father’s eyelids are clenched shut but he opens them and they’re lucid, the pupils huge, the whites no longer inflamed. In a clear voice, subdued but firm, he says, “Just heard the most beautiful sound.”

  She grips his gloved hand. “Shhh.”

  “Now I know it. Like when you arrived …”

  “Don’t talk, Papa, they’re almost here!”

  “The sound of you breathing,” he says.

  Amaris speaks to Kaljang in a whisper, all the voice she has left: “Did he make it?”

  “Sophie’s father?” Kaljang asks in a sober undertone, as if in a funeral cortege; Amaris wearing sunglasses like the widow. He grips her elbow, helping her down the last gentle stretch to the glacier. Lew lies swaddled in a sled bumping along twenty steps down the trail, Sophie walking next to him, a Gurkha towing him from the front, another braking from behind.

  Kaljang says, “Too early to be sure. I hope so.”

  “I mean Wade,” she says. “Lew’s going to pull through.”

  “You mean, he will live?”

  “He will. He has to.”

  “I hope so, for Sophie’s sake.”

  “Wade’s gone,” she whispers, “isn’t he?”

  “I’m sorry, Amaris, yes—he must be lost in the storm. A search party will be trying to climb tomorrow, but we probably won’t be getting far up in all the snow. His ex-wife did call last evening, to try to talk to him …”

  Amaris, surprised, turns her tired eyes on Kaljang; Wade gave the impression he never expected to hear from his ex-wife again.

  “I did try patching her through to him,” Kaljang says, “but alas, no answer! I’m afraid by that time, he was already unconscious or dead.”

  FOUR

  EVERY LOST COUNTRY

  This is my simple religion. There is no need for

  temples; no need for complicated philosophy.

  Our own brain, our own heart is the temple;

  the philosophy is kindness.

  —THE 14TH DALAI LAMA

  December 2006

  THE CLIP IS NO MORE THAN FIVE SECONDS, ten or fifteen seconds in slow motion, and you play it again and again, trying to be sure of what you see. Its colour is diluted, as if the scene was shot with a small hand-held device, maybe a mobile phone. Yet the lens doesn’t jiggle or recoil despite the violent action sprawling toward it—the struggle of the twinned figures in the foreground; behind them, blurred figures running through a temple courtyard in Lhasa, Tibet; a sense of riotous noise, gunfire, screaming, that was either not recorded or has been muted to subtext under the narrator’s weighty baritone. Maybe there’s a tripod involved. A more elaborate camera. Yet at no point do the foreground figures give any indication of knowing that their moment—it’s sometime in the 1990s—is being recorded. Maybe they’re too dazed and frightened to care.

  At first you confuse the Scene Select and Forward/Rewind functions on this unfamiliar remote, and this slows down the process of rewinding, replaying. Weakness and impatience make things worse, especially when it comes to coordinating the sequence of commands—pause, play, pause, fast-forward—required to view the clip in slow motion. But the hardest thing is aiming the muzzle of the remote at the stricken faces there and repeatedly squeezing the trigger, point-blank. That’s what it feels like. It always will. Your right side is weak enough that you can only hold your arm straight out for a moment, and if your aim isn’t true, you have to lower and rest the arm and gasp for breath and try again.

  All the things you’d like to rewind and try over.

  In the clip, a Chinese soldier in a pea-green helmet too large for him and a tunic with crimson trim, no weapon, stumbles toward the lens, and a face is peeking over his shoulder, somebody on his back. The face sinks out of sight, returns, brushcut skull, swollen eyes, a little Chaplin moustache of blood under the nose. The soldier himself has no moustache, just a slight pubescent fuzz over his lip. A beautiful kid with perfect bones. He could almost be a girl. His stupefied, guileless eyes are searching, his lips open in breathless bewilderment. A few steps short of the lens—this border in time and space that you can never cross—the soldier veers left and the Tibetan monk on his back appears fully, in profile, a tiny, red-robed novice, eleven or twelve years old. Subtract the setting, the outfits, the blood and the shocked, glassy stares and this is a home movie of a kid in junior high giving his little brother a ride. Pause, rewind, pause, play, pause, slow-forward. The child’s left arm extends over the soldier’s left shoulder and the soldier grips the bare arm with his own left hand. The soldier’s right hand, down by his hip, gathers a fistful of the child’s robes and holds tight. The two reach the right edge of the frame and almost pass through it and disappear—the camera wheeling, trying to follow—then the soldier swings back and the pair staggers in front of the lens for a last time. The child’s eyes keep closing and his head lolls. The soldier’s open mouth moves, perhaps speaking, reassuring himself and the child that they must now be headed for safety.

  You never know what love is going to require of you; you just hope you’ll be equal to the crisis.

  Play it at normal speed and the narration concerns “the occupier’s atrocities” and you’ve seen enough evidence of those firsthand, but if this clip is meant to simplify the categories and seal the case—Chinese warrior attacks Tibetan pacifist and drags him off to jail—it doesn’t work. See how the child-monk clings. Others have beaten the child with fists and boots and rifle butts and truncheons and who knows what else, but this Chinese soldier is trying to help him. Aim again, fire, pause. She sent you this documentary, the work of a New York colleague of hers, because she knew, you’re certain she knew, that you
would find this one brief clip and take solace in it, however pained, however partial. You keep it frozen at the last moment before the figures cross through the border of the frame, back into their differently sabotaged lives, paired in this fleeting refuge. Stay.

  December 20, 2008

  SOPHIE AND HER FATHER SIT playing bagh chal and drinking red wine in the kitchen of his small rental apartment. Everything here is mismatched in a stylish, amiable way, as if the place has been furnished from funky yard sales—a vintage Arborite table, stainless steel café chairs, no plate or glass the same but all attractive in their way. This tasteful chaos is not his work, of course; Sophie and her mother, and on one fun occasion Sophie and Amaris, furnished the apartment in preparation for his discharge from the clinic in September. It’s a third-floor apartment above a Greek café near the corner of Danforth and Logan, walking distance from the house, where Sophie is staying for the Christmas holidays before returning to Asia. This kitchen has a wide window crowded with light and a generous view west up Danforth to the clustered towers of the downtown.

  It’s the shortest day of the year but you wouldn’t know it. The late light is ample and forgiving, the sun backlighting a Himalaya of cumulous massing to the west of the city, like summer thunderheads. A sort of Chinook thaw has gripped Toronto. The snow has melted and the streets, freed of their drifts, look amazingly, promisingly wide.

  She hopes this is the last stage of his convalescence. Two years and three months, less a few days, since their return. When he emerged from his coma in a Kathmandu hospital, they flew him back to Toronto, where he entered a phase of recovery that involved serial setbacks, including some terrifying (to her) return visits to the ICU. He had sustained a certain amount of spinal damage, so that once he was out of bed he wasn’t really “back on his feet” at all, but instead working to regain function in his legs—and a few times she had to pram him down aseptic white corridors in a wheelchair, clamping shut the valves of her senses and sentiments to hold it together. Then a sort of nervous breakdown—his—although it was clear he had really been broken since the coma, his mental symptoms overshadowed by his physical struggles. At least four different doctors informed her she was lucky her father was alive. He himself never said he felt lucky to be alive, not for a long time, and that alarmed her—though now, as she sits across from him in this small, warm kitchen, playing bagh chal, he seems to feel it again, finally. His chin and jawline are fresh-shaved, blue-grey, smelling of soap, and it’s nice to see him dressed in something other than a bathrobe and pyjamas: overdyed black jeans, a new belt with a complicated pewter buckle, a crisply ironed maroon shirt. His long-lashed eyes are once again his own, no longer the low-battery, evasive, impostor’s eyes that for over a year frightened her and at times enraged her in the clinic when she visited, on her two returns from Asia, where she has been working in refugee camps in India and Nepal.

  They’re sharing a bottle of Chilean red while they play. The slanting, luscious sunlight, like eight p.m. light in July, gilds the little brass tigers and goats and projects a dense, creeping weft of shadows across the board, which makes the game’s visuals even more appealing but also makes it harder to play—hard to see exactly what’s going on. Her father, playing tigers, is en route to an easy victory and she is delighted. In the clinic she was able to beat him with zero exertion, and when she actually tried to lose to him—so as to encourage him, convince him he was improving—it didn’t help at all, he lost anyway, and that upset her very much. Now he has regained his sharpness, his pleasure in the game. Through the fall, he has been tapering off the clinic drugs and now is free of them at last. He’s bantering, almost as pleased when Sophie makes a surprise move and zoos up his southwest tiger as when, now, he leaps another of her exposed goats, inflicting a mortal wound on the herd.

  “Your goats are curry, love.”

  “Hold off on the dinner invites,” she tells him. “You’ve just lost a tiger.”

  “When Kaljang used to get me where I’ve got you, he’d urge me to resign. You need a top up?”

  “That’s just in chess, isn’t it? Shouldn’t we save some for Amaris?”

  “There’s another bottle,” he says. “Portuguese. And she’ll probably bring one too.”

  “She’ll bring gin and olives and a shaker,” Sophie replies, a touch too fast, she knows, overselling the line, like a bit player trying to steal a scene, milk extra laughs from a middling quip. But she is so relieved to have him back—so eager to keep him upbeat.

  “You heard from Kaljang lately?” he asks. “Like, in the last few hours?”

  “Maybe.” She can feel a smile betraying her, spreading over her face like a blush. Kaljang emails almost every day while she’s over here. She has been seeing him on and off in Pokhara, Nepal, where she has been volunteering some of the time and where he is now based as a climbing guide. Through him and Choden Lhamu, she gets occasional reports on the others who were with them in Tibet. Choden herself is working toward her geshe at the Dolma Ling nunnery near Dharamsala, and she writes actual letters—on yellow newsprint, in an ornately flowing cursive you’d think she learned in a distant century—to Sophie and to her father and Amaris as well. Ani Dolma is at the same nunnery, and she likes it there, though unfortunately she is often unwell these days with bronchitis and pneumonia. Dechen has been reunited with her children in the Kathmandu Valley. Sonam, Lasya, Diki and the baby—they named him Norbu Tenzin—spent four months in a refugee camp in Nepal before travelling on to Dharamsala to join the growing Tibetan exile community. The three young monks are also in Dharamsala, at the new Nechung monastery.

  Her father’s Asian Tiger, as he calls it, easily jumps a fifth goat to end the match. They switch pieces, set up the board again. The light grows richer and moodier by the moment, darkening the wine, seeming to deepen the flavour, which is growing on her, though on the whole she’d still prefer a sweet white, a lemonady rosé or an Indian lager. Her father’s Greek pasta sauce, simmering on the stove (tomato pureé, heaps of finely diced garlic and onion, basil, tuna, feta cheese) smells amazing, one of the scents of her childhood. Homemade garlic bread in foil wrap on the counter, ready for the oven.

  She still doesn’t take any of this for granted—being enfolded in this sunset, these aromas, the plentiful food, loving company—though she guesses she might be taking it for granted, by now, if it weren’t for her work in Asia. (Why is it so much easier to maintain grievances than gratitude?) Not that she’s forgotten those five days in Tibet, and what followed—her collapse after the flight home, her mono-like exhaustion, convulsive nightmares even during the day when she tried to nap (she had to nap constantly), the intense diplomatic inquiry and media attention and anonymous hate-email and rape and death threats along with all the confusing fanmail, her YouTube celebrity (1.8 million hits and counting for her video of the Khiong Glacier Shootings), her mother’s dizzying shifts between incredulous rage and smothering care, Pavlos’s pivots from untypical affection to mute tantrums of envy over her “fame,” the therapy her mother insisted on and that she felt too tired for, the aftermath of the bungled heist, which meant community service the court now agreed to defer, and her father, of course, suddenly childlike—which made her feel responsible far beyond her present capacities, which angered her, yet again, their roles again reversed years too soon.

  And Amaris? Who’s on her way over here now, twenty minutes late, but then Sophie senses that’s normal for her, she’s always overbooked, editing video on her laptop or writing emails till the last minute and slightly beyond, then leaping up and dressing fast (yet smoothly, as if she’s planned her evening outfit earlier in the day, knowing she’ll be running late), daubing on a little makeup in her nice bathroom (Sophie has visited several times), her mouth a beautiful O as she hurries on the lipstick, eyes widened with a sense of urgency and irritation at being late yet again. She has been working hard to finish her new film, a short documentary she won’t say much about, except that it’s set on
the Mexican-American border and there’s no dialogue or voiceover, just a few framing titles and music. She has done nothing yet, she says, with all the footage she downloaded onto her laptop at base camp, before being captured. Friends and colleagues all tell her it’s a diamond mine waiting to be dug—think of it, a feature doc about Wade Lawson’s last climb, combined with her recollections of the ordeal in Tibet! In fact, several big producers have approached her, but she still isn’t ready to go back to the material. Besides, her starring role in the crisis has brought her enough attention, both good and bad, that for now she’s under no pressure to do anything lucrative. She also feels (and she looks surprised to hear herself tell it, the exclamatory crease between her eyebrows deepening) sorry for Wade, dying up there completely alone, and she doesn’t want to exploit that and make a film until she is certain she can do it in the right way.