Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Ahmet, however, was pleased to see his lost lamb. He was older than Halis, and clearly wiser, but not a leader. He possessed a sad tenderness, in contrast with the mountain. For ninety seconds we cultivated a warm friendship, until he had exhausted his English vocabulary and I had exhausted myself. “Cigarettes,” I confessed, pounding my chest, mock-coughing. Ahmet brightened. He pulled a pack from his shirt pocket and offered me one, which I declined, but he lit one for himself, raising his chin toward the impossible summit and squinting down at me. “Cigarette . . . no problem,” he struggled to explain. “Ararat . . . no problem.”

  This was exactly my attitude, though I could afford it only in spirit. Among my company I was the slowest, the preordained last, eating the troops’ dust until I was alone. Every five minutes I stopped to suck air like a vacuum cleaner. I felt fine, but my lungs lacked capacity, and everyone’s physical superiority was in dramatic contrast to my own self-inflicted limitations. Repeatedly I lost sight of the procession weaving into gullies, behind crags, but the path was unmistakable and, as I slugged it out in my solitude, it was gratifying to imagine I had embarked on a quest. Noah had been six hundred years old when the Almighty enlisted him in the navy. I had come to Ararat to learn, on the eve of my fortieth year, just how much stuffing I had left in me. The trek was not pure, but then neither was I. I sat down on a basalt throne and, plucking what I thought was wild mint, raised a stinging nettle to my nose.

  Base camp was dug in atop a scraped knuckle of ground; above us, Ararat remained the same, monolithic and undiminished. Dinner was set and the field cook stuffed us with a variety of tasteless carbohydrates. I had a beer and was instantly drunk. I lit a cigarette—my sixth of the day, compared with my usual fifty—and was simultaneously stoned. Ahmet and I sat leg against leg and chatted like two retarded brothers. The sun set and took the world with it. Out in the dusty central plaza of our bivouac, the staff smashed up packing crates and built a modest campfire. The Europeans meditated upon the lambent flames for a minute, then burst into beer hall songs. The clock eased back several aeons, and the darkness muted our many voices, made every gesture meaningful, and offered us the illusion that we were a tried and tested community, which felt nice, as illusions often do.

  The next day dawned cold and clear—9/9/90, my birthday, and I fully expected to die, choking either on chemical gas drifting north from the war in Iraq or Nicorette gum or both. As I understood the plan, our objective for the day was to acclimatize to the altitude, promenade up to 13,800 feet, where the high camp was situated, eat lunch, exclaim about how damn high and cold it really was, retreat back down the slope to our feathered nests, and rejoice, each according to his abilities. My plan was more ambitious: I had vowed to forsake smoking the entire day and night, breaking a twenty-year record.

  When Ahmet saw me at breakfast, he beamed, all bright and cheering rays. “Bob! We go! No problem!” He shook a cigarette from his pack, tempting me back into the brotherhood. I had no alternative but to flee, slipping in with Halis’s veterans. Hands-on, the first and lasting impression of Ararat was of a volcanic dreamscape where a wanderer was forbidden to ask for forgiveness. Massive basalt bombs peppered its flanks in all directions, fanned out like black huts at the lower altitudes but increasing in density the higher we went, until we were picking our way through huge tumbled galleries, the rocks sharply edged like broken lumps of glass. Where there were no rocks, there were baked meadows of field grass, rasping in the wind. The mountain was overgrazed, not by livestock but by the macrocosm. Instead of the expected bears and wolves and wild boars, I could do no better than a ladybug and a half-dozen honeybees. Ararat was theirs.

  I began to falter and soon drifted back among Sandwich and his ducklings, all in a row, stabbing one another with their ski poles. I pulled over to let them pass. “Good day.” I bowed. “Lovely morning, eh? Auf Wiedersehen.” Those who spoke English pecked at me, vicious health harpies, and those who didn’t made do with cold neglect. I had not announced my birthday because being celebrated, I feared, would interfere with my growing dignity as a scapegoat. Accordingly, I fell back some more, and there was Ahmet.

  “Ahmet, are you following me? I can feel you breathing down my neck.”

  “Bob! Bob! Bob! We go. No problem. We smoke. It’s good.”

  My conversations with Ahmet were intensely soothing. When I looked up from my feet to speak again, though, there was Rudi glowering at me, and when I looked up the next time, I was alone on Ararat, tracking boot prints through an illicit solitude. I had never seen silence of such uncompromised scope, the altitude abstracting the valley and composing the panorama of the horizon into a Euclidean sampler, all swooping, slanting masses, planispheres and primary shapes, glimmering in the thermals. It was as fine a birthday present as I’d ever received.

  I stayed with the trail until midafternoon, when I caught sight of high camp, still, at my speed, an hour ahead, and then turned back down. To my surprise, Ahmet was waiting for me, clearly set at ease to see he wouldn’t have to go and fetch me. He clapped me on the back and we descended, dropping into another twisty, close-walled gully, so steep our strides grew longer and longer as gravity put the idea into our heads to race. Ahmet whooped and accelerated out of sight. I braked to a stop, red lights blinking. I had thought prudence and good judgment and flexibility would keep me out of hot water, but no one had told me going up was easy, compared with going down. All the unpaid bills started coming due. My return took hours, and it infused weariness right into my marrow. I fell four times, controlled slides through the gravel that sucked out from under me, my legs too weak to fight.

  Back in camp, off-duty soldiers were cooling out in the community tent, paying rapt attention to a broadcast from a transistor radio. From our quartermaster, I purchased a bottle of water and joined them at the table. We shook hands, and I asked them to aim high if they saw me sleepwalking. Erol was there, so I had asked him for news from Iraq and Saudi Arabia—were they still on the map? The soldiers said screw the news, screw Iraq; they were listening to a soccer game. I finished the water and begged for hot tea. My flesh throbbed in its cells.

  I asked Erol to tell Ahmet I wanted to discuss a few things with him. It was done. Ahmet peered keenly into my face, without expression, then spoke rapidly to Erol, who translated. “He says, ‘What do you want to know?’”

  “I want to find out the history of the Kurds.”

  Ahmet studied me and gave me the most piercing look of betrayal I have ever received. And yet I didn’t get it. He spoke again to Erol, waited for the translation, and left. Now even Erol seemed oddly without humor.

  “Ahmet says he is sorry, but he knows nothing about the history of the Kurds.”

  What a damn vacant fool I was. The Kurds had been gassed in Iraq, massacred in Iran; Turkey was the one relatively safe haven they occupied in the world, and even here they were under the thumb, however lightly it pressed. The inviolable mountains near the Iraqi border were a Kurdish stronghold and in fact supported an armed (but largely inactive) independence movement. And although the Kurds held elected seats in parliament, the Kurdish language remained banned in all public forms. Essentially, at an expense I had no ability to calculate, I had just asked Ahmet to jeopardize his employment and maybe make a tour of his own in the police stations.

  Erol, no dummy, shrugged it off. Nobody wanted the camp contaminated by politics, where it had no place, no use, no point. I felt wretched, then infinitely worse as Erol explained they had summoned another guide up the mountain from Doğubayazit. He spoke En­glish and would be assigned to me alone. Oh, the ignominy, to be coddled with my own guide! And, as my composure failed, he introduced ­himself—Bulent, a Turk from the Sea of Marmara—and as he talked on, I impolitely cradled my head on the table, with no desire whatever for palaver. He gave up on me and walked away.

  I had not smoked yesterday, nor would I today, and I was swaggering a bit after breakfast
, because I knew I had high camp nailed. Bulent quickly asserted his own approach to the way things were done. While the Kurdish guides folded their hands over the small of their backs, lending a preoccupied, professorial stoop to their walking posture, Bulent favored ski poles to assist his footing. At the gorge above camp, where Halis veered his squad to the right, Bulent led me to the left, politely suggesting I not step on the fragile grass. For the most part, we spoke little but pegged along, Bulent monitoring my progress and condition. When the party halted for lunch, we were right there.

  But then I ruined myself again by clambering into the rocks, my stomach churning. After a particularly long pause to catch my wind, I pivoted summitward to discover Bulent asleep on his feet, bent over his poles. The afternoon turned late. On the perimeter of high camp, I lowered myself down onto the rubble, hypnotized by Ararat. Finally I was here, on the threshold of the summit of the beast. Beneath its white mass, the high camp was like a grotto, cloud-shadowed and mysterious, quarried out from the glacier, its palisades of ice streaked with dirt and volcanic debris. Stones plinked out of the frozen face and rolled musically onto the moraine.

  As soon as the tent was pitched, a blizzard raged down on us, stretching prodigiously to the valley two miles below. Rob and I scuttled inside. I could not unzip my sleeping bag. I could not manage the zipper on my day pack or my duffel bag. If anybody had inquired about me, I would have to tell them I had keeled over dead. I lay on my sleeping bag, booted and jacketed. It had grown terrifically cold. Dinner was called, but I could not respond. Bulent brought me a cup of macaroni soup, a thermos of tea. Falling through layer after layer of stupefying aches, I landed on a brittle layer of sleep. Bulent was back at two a.m., rousing us for the summit.

  There were stars above the silvered dome, but not many—no omens good or bad. Rob had defected from Halis’s group, and together with Bulent we groped our way forward, Bulent’s headlamp dabbing into the unknown. On Ararat, I had not made the acquaintance of steep until now. Executing a tight back-and-forth traverse, we made a zigzag stitch right up over the rocks. If you’ve humped up the Washington Monument with your throat swollen shut and a clothespin on your nose and a chest cold, that’s about what it was like on the first section, at least for me.

  We constituted a provisional vanguard. Below, the embers of Halis’s raiders bobbed out from camp and formed a beautiful jeweled snake, slithering upward. A crag obscured them, and then they came into view again, they were halfway to us, we could hear their dull clank and puff, and Sandwich was coming on. By the time Ahmet waded into the invisible stream of night, Halis had overtaken us, and we halted to let his company pass. The imagery was powerful, militaristic—the solemn clandestine movement under cover of night, the lowered heads and muffled thuds of boot steps, the circumspect cones of dim light preceding each individual, the intense sense of mission that prohibited talk or comment, the implicit glory. The operation was pure war-game and uplifting drama, and since we had no sons to give to it, we gave up Rob, who fastened himself like a burr on the tail of a wolf and was gone.

  Sandwich filed by. No one exchanged a word. Ahmet filed by and I thought I recognized a radiance from a visible fragment of Ahmet’s smile, wishing me well. Twenty minutes later, when we craned our necks, we could see the almost imperceptible backwash of light from the procession above us; then it flicked its tail for the last time, and vanished.

  “Bub?”

  “Bulent?” Bulent’s English was better than he gave himself credit for, but clogged and submerged in the deep bass vowels and glottal stops, irrefutably male, of Turkish.

  “Uh . . . how do you feel? Are you sick? Does your head ache? Do you want to stop?”

  This discourse became the refrain of our ascent, an Araratian call-and-response: Are you . . . ? No, boss. Do you . . . ? No, boss. Bulent was my Moses, leading me to an elusive promised land, and I hearkened to his command. In the growing light he seemed more trusting of me, permitting himself to ascend out of view. Ten minutes ahead, I’d find him sagged over his poles, dozing.

  To tell the truth, I felt like the most persecuted man on the planet, and I had ceased joking with myself about my prospects or the risks. I traveled only in twelve-foot sections or less, my lungs extended to full volume with each breath, but the wash of oxygen was missing, and I could not be satisfied. Extended beyond my limits, past ordinary recklessness, I had put myself in a position where anything could happen. I was aware that altitude sickness buried mountaineers no matter their level of experience, that it was most lethal to climbers with a stubborn streak, and that I was a prime but untested candidate for it. I was suffering as I had never suffered, and yet there was an absorbing momentum, an onward press so inexorable that it never crossed my mind to dig in my foot and make it stop, a perpetual motion aspiring onward, but all the while descending within, unseen, like a deep-sea diver.

  I pushed on alone for a few minutes. A storm had enveloped the summit, but the first trekkers would be dancing on it by now. I gazed up from my labor and saw Rudi, picking his way down toward me, on the verge of panic. He shouted in my face, thumping the left side of his chest. I understood the words “heart attack.” I nodded with lethargic stupidness and he pushed wildly past, bent forward into an invisible gale.

  Bulent and I reunited without mentioning Rudi; he simply asked if I would be happier back in camp.

  “Bulent, do you want me to go back?”

  It wasn’t a fair question at all, and I knew he shouldn’t answer it. On his deadpan face his own weariness showed from this frustrating trial of his patience. But the question seemed to make him reconsider the unspoken nature of our pact, and he grinned. We rested for a half hour, replenished ourselves with liquids, and pressed on.

  After this, everything was different between us. Bulent’s brow unfurrowed; a bit of excitement merried his eyes. For eight and a half hours we’d been clawing the slope together, and now he suddenly had faith in my perseverance. We had become partners. He looked at his wristwatch. There was still time to reach the summit, he said, if I could increase my pace.

  He encouraged one more surge from me, which placed me gasping on a ledge. Before I could catch my wind and move, Halis and his partisans blocked the path in front of me, fattened with self-esteem, and I spent three unnecessary steps climbing off to let them pass. I offered congratulations, but no one looked over at me.

  I convinced myself to take the next four steps. I made forty or fifty, at glacial speed, before the next group pushed me aside. Sandwich hailed me on the wing; the others glanced sideways with no fellowship to spare, as though I might jump in their way. This cold shoulder for such hot effort! To hell with false modesty—I’d earned a salute, a nod, something. They have slain Mount Ararat, I cried out in righteousness, emulating Noah in that regard. They have bagged their trophy, and must make room on the shelf.

  I trudged ahead and came even with Bulent. From here, the seamless bleak roll of the summit was at hand, and we saw Ahmet’s company hiking down its curve. Two hundred feet above us the rockscape terminated for good upon a knoll, and nothing beyond but the glacier. Rob appeared on its crest and bounded down to where we stood. He had been among the first on top in order to make fotoçek. “You didn’t miss anything,” he said, downplaying it for my benefit.

  This was too much. I narrowed my eyes down the mountain, down toward the valley where all human endeavor had been rendered ­microscopic—furious, furious. “I put a curse on all of them,” I snarled. I condemned them to roam endlessly in search of fatuous triumph, stumbling to keep up with a merciless cigar-smoking guide, spraining their ankles on the bones of sinners that cluttered the trails to Paradise.

  “What?” Rob said, his eyes opening wide. “Look, don’t worry about them.” He told me I was doing great; he was proud of me.

  “Great?” I snapped. “Phooey. Anyone who wants to climb this mountain can, except for fascist relics in cardiac arrest an
d diarrhetic junkies.” I couldn’t help but wonder if tantrums were a little-known symptom of altitude sickness. Noah’s sole recorded utterance in the Bible was a curse and a blessing, so there was the mountaineer’s precedent.

  Bulent and I pressed ahead, atoning for my peccadilloes. I struggled now with a mild headache. Bulent took six more steps and turned to see if I had followed. I hadn’t. My pulse roared, I waited for it to calm itself, and we moved on. Ahmet appeared above us on the crest. He threw his arms up when he spotted me and came hopping joyously down the slope as fast as his legs would carry him. From the beginning he had measured me by my own standards. He had studied them as he studied everything, an avid student of all that came his way out here in the remote core of eastern Turkey, and he had not found them wanting—he understood what the mountain was for me. Whatever the price of his tribute and compassion, it was worth it; worth, in fact, more—an Everest or two. He crowed, he embraced me, his face stuck in mine, eyes glistening, nodding emotionally and with exhilaration. “Bob! Bravo! Bravo, Bob!” And then he let me go and was gone to tend his flock.

  It was the greatest inducement to endure and do well that a person could expect from heaven or earth, but that was it for me. I had been undermined by Ahmet’s goodness. We pressed on, conquering the knoll, and tagged the glacier—16,200 feet. Bulent was very happy. “One hour more. We can do it, we can,” he said. “You are so pigheaded. We can.”

  “Bulent,” I said, “I can’t.” The hour would split slowly and divide into two. There was no chance he could urge me back down before nightfall. I had seen what I could do, and this was it.

  An hour above base camp, we threw ourselves down in the dust, propped our backs against a single boulder, slept deeply for a few minutes, and awoke to the light melting across the valley like butter, quieting the emptiness. An alpine coolness circulated on the breeze, refreshing and sweet. Bulent conceded I had used good judgment in deciding to turn back, though he still believed we could have made it. Maybe next year, I idly replied. We had become friends, and we sat together in the stunning peace of the plateau and talked as friends do, about our histories, our politics, our loves; about mountains—he wanted me to see the Kaçkar range, the Little Caucasus, along the Black Sea coast, which he thought the most lovely in all of Turkey. I told him I would—and did, the following week, driving off with Rob to Lake Van, then to Harran, on the border with Syria, where Abraham had once lived; making another predawn climb, this time to the summit of Nemrut Dagi to see the sunrise considered by the ancients to be the most beautiful in the world; then finally to the Black Sea, Bulent’s Shangri-la, to marvel at the Kaçkars and wish we were on them . . . but we had run out of time.