Shan left the old truck in a clearing half a mile below Tumkot and was picked up by Yates in his red utility vehicle a few minutes before he reached the village. Shan motioned the American to park in the shadow between two sheds at the edge of the village.
“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked as he took a peche sheet removed from his workshop and rolled it, extending it to the American. “A prayer rolled like this?”
Yates took the little cylinder of parchment, unrolled it, repeated the process himself. “Maybe just a way to store a prayer? Or a way to put it in a mani wall, or one of the little statues,” he added. He seemed utterly fascinated by the rolled prayer. Shan let him hold on to it as they moved along the dirt street and down the worn stone stairs that led to the main square.
No one was home at Kypo’s house. Ama Apte’s house was likewise empty. Shan lifted the bench outside the fortuneteller’s entry and set it inside, in the shadows just past the pool of light cast through the open door. Yates, restless as ever, wandered around the dimly lit stalls of the lower floor, asking Shan the Tibetan names of some of the implements, the meaning of some of the fortuneteller’s signs drawn on the wall inside the door. He stumbled over something lying in the shadows and the goat leaped up with a surprised bleat. Frightened at first, it quieted as the American stroked its back. Shan saw the animal’s swollen udder, found the tin bucket the astrologer kept by the door and began milking as Yates sang a song to the goat about a racehorse named Stewball.
There they sat, like two lonely shepherds, when Ama Apte walked in with Kypo and her granddaughter. Though they bore the grime of heavy trekking and looked exhausted, Ama Apte’s son advanced on them as if to eject them from the house, resentment in his eyes.
“We are not your enemies, Kypo” Shan stated, putting a restraining hand on Yates as the American began to rise.
“You are not Tibetans.” Kypo’s voice grew heated as he spoke. “It’s always the same. You outsiders dabble in our affairs like it is some game, then leave us to take the punishment.”
“Tibet should be for Tibetans,” Shan declared. “If my leaving improved the chances of Tibetans achieving their own country again I would pack my bag tomorrow.”
The words hung in the air. Kypo stepped in front of his daughter as if to protect her, nervously watching his mother.
“Easy for you to say,” Ama Apte replied. “Just words.”
Shan returned the woman’s steady gaze then looked down at the packed earth floor between his feet, fighting an unexpected feeling of melancholy. “In the yeti factory,” he stated, each word like a spasm of pain, “my son is a prisoner. If I cannot find the truth of the killings by the day after tomorrow they will use his brain for a medical experiment.”
Not even the goat moved.
“Jesus, Shan,” Yates gasped. “You never. . ” His words drifted away.
Kypo uttered a curse under his breath. His daughter clutched his leg, pressing her head into his hip.
“It is time for the truth,” Shan said, gazing pointedly at Ama Apte. “It is time for all the truth. No fortunetelling. No dice. No hiding in the future or behind the fates. You were searching Megan Ross’s tent at the base camp. You didn’t find what you wanted.”
“You don’t know that,” the woman replied in a brittle voice.
Shan reached inside his shirt, extracted the notebook and dropped it on an empty stool. “This is what you wanted.”
Ama Apte sighed, her eyes wide as she stared at Megan Ross’s journal. “We shall have tea.”
As the astrologer stepped to the doorway to work her churns, Shan scanned the last few entries in the notebook. Anticipation was in the words, even excitement, starting with a visit to a particular curve in the mountain road.
Nathan says it is all too dangerous but he showed me how to rig the site so no one would have to be there. He must think I am some kind of engineer. Began to lay out the new route up the North Col. Nathan wants a private route up, so we won’t keep running into the other expeditions. When Tenzin arrives we will start scouting.
Next came a poem about mountains in the moonlight, like silver steps to heaven, then sketches of birds and a hairy seated figure that might have been a meditating yeti. The next day brought a reference to the road, and the reason Ama Apte had been looking for the book.
Ama Apte and I walked the slope today. Bless her, she says I should not worry, that she will do this for me and the mountain, and the monks, that there will be enough moonlight for her to set it up the night before. Then, after a sketch of a ritual dagger, Tenzin arrived! followed by a matter-of-fact entry about the new route above the base camp and calculations of the number of oxygen bottles needed for the first expedition, ending with Nathan and I are insisting that every bottle be carried back down and that any customer who leaves litter on the top slopes will never climb with us again!
The last entry was short. Went up to inspect the first advance camp. I found Tenzin there alone, separated from the others by the heavy blow on the slope above. He agrees with the whole plan, will organize the sherpas to hold up a banner supporting the Compact at the minister’s picnic at Rongphu. Had to leave him before dawn to catch an unexpected ride to town. Have to ask Tsipon why we are leaving so much money in the Hong Kong accounts. I told Ama Apte we will rewrite the future of Chomolungma! They were the last words.
When he looked up, Ama Apte was staring at him, holding the hot water kettle. “She told Tenzin,” he explained. “She told him everything. It got him killed.”
Ama Apte’s eyes filled with moisture. “But he wasn’t anywhere close. He wasn’t going to do anything but hold up a banner.”
It was Yates who explained. “There was another person who knew, an invisible one who couldn’t leave Tenzin alive to say he had used Megan’s plan as a cover for murder.”
The fortuneteller said no more until she had handed her visitors mugs of tea. “Let us go to the yeti factory,” she announced. “Let us find a way to rescue your son.”
Shan replied with a small, sad smile. “Thank you but no. That is something only I can do.”
“They are the new gods, you know,” she said into her cup of tea. “What they write down a thousand miles away becomes our truth, like the old lamas who once wrote our sutras. They hung a new slogan on the municipal building. The Party Is Our Buddha.”
Kypo bent to his daughter and pointed to the door.
“No,” his mother said, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “She must hear this. She has no choice but to live with the new gods. There is no going back. The old gods and the old Tibetans, all we can do is to find ways to fade away with dignity.”
Kypo’s face drained of color. He knelt and tightly embraced his daughter, as if it was his turn to be frightened.
“So is that what this is about, Aunt Ama?” Shan asked in a flat voice as he rose. “It’s your way of giving up?”
A tear ran down Ama Apte’s strong, handsome face. She bent to the kettle and poured more tea.
“Last summer, at the end of the season,” the astrologer said, “Megan came to me, and said she wanted to stay here with me for the winter. It was illegal, I told her. It would endanger Kypo, because the authorities would assume as a local climbing manager he was behind it. She didn’t argue, she just asked me to go with her up one of her mountains. A hard climb, but not one needing ropes. We were gone five days. On the last night she watched the stars for hours, like a meditation. She said the universe was different in Tibet. She said she was going to die here again.”
“Again?” Yates asked.
Ama Apte offered a sad smile. “That’s what I asked. She said she had a sudden realization on her last ascent of Chomolungma, as she stood on the summit, that she had lived here in another life.”
“You’re trying to make it appear I was involved with her, in the ambush,” Yates said after another long silence.
“No. Only I was involved, with a little help from a tarchok ghost,” Ama Apte confes
sed with a glance at the notebook. She did not look at Yates, just stared into one of the flickering lamps by the kettle.
“You tried to get me arrested by Public Security,” Yates accused, “by putting a robe in my trash and those snaplinks with beads under my bed.”
“Not arrested,” Shan said, “only deported.”
Ama Apte was biting her lip like an anxious girl.
“I never did anything to hurt you,” Yates said to the woman.
“You don’t understand,” the fortuneteller said, her gaze not shifting from the flame. “You could never understand. Just know it is a killing season on the mountain. Go home. Even if you try the ascent, the mountain will push you back.”
“Without the climbers,” Kypo said in a near whisper, “I can’t put food on my family’s table.”
Ama Apte replied only with her eyes, which held a sad, soulful expression that Shan saw on old lamas, the look that said the only answers that meant anything were the ones you found for yourself.
As he studied her Shan began to sense that all the mysteries, all the questions about the killings, the strange behavior of so many Tibetans had begun with the mystery of who Ama Apte really was.
“We should eat,” she announced in a new, spirited voice, and clapped her hands to rouse everyone from their trance.
The mood quickly shifted as the astrologer returned to the role of mother and grandmother, instructing Kypo to bring a larger brazier, her granddaughter to retrieve water, Shan and Yates to carry trestles and planks outside into the rear courtyard of her house for a makeshift table. They ate thick thanthuk noodles and mutton, making quiet, casual conversation, Kypo and Yates at last laying a map of Chomolungma on the table to discuss the always complicated task of staging supplies at advance camps.
Kypo’s daughter leaned on the table beside the two men, listening attentively, her eyes wide with a sense of adventure. After a few minutes Yates searched his pockets, producing a metal ballpoint pen that he presented as a gift to the girl, who accepted with blushing thanks.
“Half the oxygen at Camp One for now, and half there,” he said, pointing to a mark indicating Camp Two. As he did so, Ama Apte gasped, dropping one of the dishes she was clearing. She stared with a stricken expression at Yates’s hand. He was absently holding the rolled-up peche page from his pocket, using it as a pointer. The Tibetan woman abruptly sprang forward, seized the rolled page, and slapped Yates on the cheek.
The stunned American reeled backward. Tears welled in Ama Apte’s eyes. She collapsed onto a stool, her head in her hands, sobbing. Kypo, Shan and Yates exchanged dumbfounded looks. Kypo knelt at his mother’s side, his hand on her shoulder. As Shan took a step forward, Kypo warned him off with a shake of his head and pointed to the street. Ama Apte began weeping. She seemed unconsolable.
Shan and Yates stood at the American’s truck minutes later, the two men gazing back uncertainly toward the fortuneteller’s house. “It’s like she’s having some sort of breakdown,” Yates said forlornly. “All the stress. She’s going to get herself arrested. She has to stay away from them.”
Shan realized the American was talking about the monks, that Yates had reached the same conclusion as Shan. Ama Apte had taken the monks from the base camp, and was hiding them somewhere on the forbidden mountain above the village.
“The fugitive monks are now considered assassins and traitors,” Shan said. “Those caught helping them will be treated the same way.”
“You’re saying it would be the firing squad?”
“And if they try to cross the border there are snipers positioned in the passes. Two years ago nuns trying to flee across to Nepal were killed with high-powered rifles.”
“Someone has to tell her.”
“She won’t listen. I think the astrologer sees her own fate and has decided it cannot be altered.”
Yates leaned on the hood of his truck, buried his head in his hands. “I’m finished.” He seemed strangely weary, as if he had just returned from an oxygen-deprived climb. “I’m sorry about her. I’m sorry about Megan. I am sorry about your son. But I am done. I won’t be involved with more killings. Stay away from me. You and I are on different paths. Stop dragging me onto yours. I’m taking my climbers up the mountain as fast as I can, then going home. It’s like she said. It’s a killing season.”
“Then it is I who apologize to you,” Shan replied. He stepped to the window on the driver’s door and with his finger began drawing in the caked-on dust.
“What the hell are you talking-” As Yates lifted his head his words died away. He stared without breathing at the sign Shan had drawn. “How could you possibly-” his words drifted away again as his finger traced Shan’s crude but accurate drawing of a crossed hammer and lightning bolt.
“I’ve been trying to make you understand, Yates. You and I are after the same thing. It is all about something that happened decades ago.”
Yates cast an uncertain glance at Shan, then his gaze went back to the symbol on the glass. “Kypo says you’re like a magnet to knobs. I can’t afford any more trouble.”
“Just take a walk with me.”
“Where?”
“Up to see your father.”
The two men did not speak as they climbed toward the top of the high ridge that curled around Tumkot. Yates, like Shan, no doubt recalled the last time they had been on the trail, assaulting each other in the moonlight as Yates carried his sack of little gods down the mountain.
The American slowed as they approached the ruined shrine, lingering behind. More than once Shan paused to look back and see Yates stopped, gazingly longingly toward the peak of Everest, visible in the distance. As he reached the shrine Shan halted, kneeling at a crumbling wall of lichen-covered mani stones, restacking and straightening the wall as the American approached with hesitant steps. Yates’s countenance held caution, perhaps even fear, but there was also a hint of shame as he glanced at the altar where he had removed the ancient figurines. “I will bring them back,” he said of the little gods he had taken. “I was always going to bring them back.”
He knelt beside Shan and silently assisted him with the stones, cleaning the faces inscribed with prayers, handing them to Shan for restacking.
After several minutes Shan stood. “I know some Tibetans who have a different way of speaking when they are at these shrines. There are words for addressing old gods that most younger Tibetans don’t even know, special prayers, special prostrations. I felt uncomfortable coming to such places at first, like an outsider or worse, like one of those who had caused the destruction. Then a monk took me to a patch of flowers that were bent beneath some stones fallen from a crumbling altar. He told me to remove the stones and replace them in the altar. When the flowers had straightened he said ‘Now your reverence is mingled with all the reverence that came before, which makes the shrine as much yours as mine.’” Yates searched Shan’s face as if trying to understand, then knelt and restacked a few more mani stones as Shan stepped to the altar under the overhanging ledge.
“This place has nothing to do with my father,” Yates declared, challenge in his voice. “If you think you can trick me into-” His complaint faded as he followed the finger Shan pointed toward the end of the altar. The crucifix was still there, in the dust of the altar, where Shan had left it days earlier.
The American’s hand shot out to grab the silver cross, then hesitated, lingering in the air. There was no question in Yates’s eyes, only a torrent of emotion. When he finally lifted the cross, he cupped it in both hands, as though it might crumble. He brought it out into the sunlight, studying it in silence as he dropped onto the remnants of a stone bench.
“I’ve seen it in a photograph,” he explained in a stunned voice.
“That last year he was at home, when I was two years old, there was a photo taken of me in his arms with my hand wrapped around the chain that held this.” He looked up with an intense gaze, searching the clearing. “I don’t know what it means, finding it here. Thi
s could have just been planted here last week.”
“No,” Shan said. “It’s been there for decades. You can see its shape imprinted in the layers of dust. It was there before most of the Yama statues.”
“Impossible,” Yates muttered. But he was arguing with himself, not Shan. He kept turning the cross over and over in his hand, examining every surface, as if expecting it to somehow divulge its secret. And it did speak to him, for after a moment he pointed to a small set of letters inscribed on the reverse of the cross. “SRY,” he declared in a voice that cracked with emotion, pointing the letters out to Shan. “My father’s initials. Samuel was his name.” He fell silent for a long moment. “Tuchaychay,” he said, expressing his gratitude in Tibetan. “I owe you.”
“What you owe me is the truth.”
When Yates did not reply, Shan rose and gestured to the figurines remaining on the altar. “You owe it to them as well. You need to explain to these gods the real reason you came to them as a thief in the night, why one of them was lost over this cliff.” He extended his hand toward Yates, palm open. “Only the truth can be spoken in front of them.”
The American understood. He dropped the crucifix into Shan’s hand, glanced uneasily toward the altar and paced around the clearing in silence, pausing to clean and stack half a dozen more mani stones as Shan waited at the old bench. At last Yates rose and sat before the altar, looking at each of the gods in turn, as if silently greeting them.
“I used to do jigsaw puzzles of medieval paintings with my aunt and uncle who raised me,” Yates began. “Hundreds of pieces with shades of gray and brown, with a few patches of brilliant color. They made sense only if you kept the complete picture in mind as you worked. My father was always like that to me. I had only fragments to work with, and never had an image of the man as a whole. My aunt and uncle would speak of him with the same sound bites, never changing. A good, honest man. A great athlete. A lover of freedom. A fantastic aviator.”
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