Exiles

April 2006

He sat against the earthen wall, hungry and exhausted, with his knees pulled up in front of him, as if they could somehow shield him from what was coming. The wall was cool and damp behind him. It made him ache, the cold seeping into his bones the way water freezes inside rocks and cracks them apart.

Night sounds: wind in pines, the peep and rasping of insects, subdued human voices, fires popping. From higher up the mountain came the clack and heavy rumble of a rockfall; the dirt floor quivered with its subtle seismic waves. He was alert, by now, to any sound that might promise deliverance, but the slide had probably just been set off by gravity or by one of the myriad little temblors that rattled the mountains.

He drifted in and out of sleep. Dream images seemed to appear on the hut’s dark walls. He was back in California, walking with his daughter in sunlight. They passed under a tree, and leaf shadows danced across her face. She smiled at him and asked a question, but she spoke in a language he didn’t understand. He tried to
make out her words. She grew frustrated then, and finally strode on without him. When he tried to follow, he found that he had taken root there. He watched her walk away for what seemed hours, until she was lost, a speck on a smudged horizon.

“Peter,” said a voice. He shuddered. “Try to stay awake.” It was Devi. “We don’t have much time.”

He dreaded sleep, and he desired it more than anything. “Right,” he whispered. Even more than sleep, he wanted water.

As the dream receded, he saw reflected firelight playing on the wall, and he could just make out Devi’s silhouette and shadowed face. Alex, his daughter, lay curled on her side, asleep, her head in Devi’s lap. Her skin was covered with grime. He and Devi had decided to wait, to awaken her as close to the end as possible.

Devi’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. She sat cross-legged, her right hand on Alex’s shoulder, her left on her own knee. She was strong, formidable even in stillness, her face serene. She was only a year older than Alex, but the troubles of her life had tempered her to a degree that was becoming fully evident only now, when others would have broken and she did not.

Ten or twelve people crouched or lay in the hut, people who had presumably been here far longer. There was quiet moaning, though it was impossible to tell if it came from those who slept or those who were awake, whether it was due to hunger, or cold, or thirst, or dysentery, or indeed some combination of all these, to the general deprivation and depravity of the place.

Teenagers with rifles loitered outside, smoking and laughing. The hut reeked from unwashed bodies and from the plastic five-gallon bucket in the corner that served as a latrine. During the day, a cloud of flies hovered over it, and there was, of course, no toilet paper. Everyone’s clothes stank of shit. Peter had averted his eyes, a couple of hours earlier, as Alex squatted miserably over the bucket, her pants around her ankles, emptied by diarrhea until her bones seemed to grow through her gleaming, sweaty skin.

She finally crawled back—but to Devi, not to him. She would be eighteen in three weeks. Would have been eighteen, that is, if
things had not gone so quickly and catastrophically wrong. Civilization’s comforts had turned out to be a thin crust of ice over deep, cold waters, and it had taken only a couple of days to reduce the three of them from their comfortable life in Kathmandu to this.

Soon they would have to clump together to hold off the cold. The camp sat in a valley at twelve thousand feet, choked with rhododendrons and mist. Someone lit a kerosene lantern outside, and its yellow glare pressed into the hut, filtered into tiny specks by the tattered burlap hanging in the doorway. An avalanche of cool air gathered at the head of the valley and began to roll down, stirring the trees. Peter heard it for fifteen or twenty seconds before it finally blew into camp, flapping canvas and filling the air with dust. The lantern swayed, splashing light around drunkenly. Somewhere a piece of corrugated tin made a woofing noise and a dog barked back. The door curtain billowed in, and outside stood a short, skinny kid with a Kalashnikov half as tall as he was. He glanced in at them, looking indignant that he had to be there at all, barefoot in the night. His eyes had the contemptuous glare of most of these soldiers, kids who had been forced from their families by hunger and fear, who couldn’t afford the softnesses of childhood.

After a few minutes the wind died as fast as it had started. Outside, a boom box came on, playing American heavy metal.

Peter cursed himself, remembering his conversation with the commandant. He’d been outflanked without even realizing it. Now he was trembling as much from fear as from cold. He wished he could believe in something comforting, but he was long past trying to convince himself. Anyway, when they came for them, what difference would it make? So what if you wept, begging, as he half expected to do? A couple of minutes later it would all be the same.

Someone shouted outside. Peter pulled himself further into wakefulness and looked around. Devi hadn’t moved. Alex breathed softly. He’d missed a leech inside his boot, he was sure of it now, but he was too exhausted to go rooting after it. Scratching at the bites just made them bleed, anyway.

In one way, the feeling of relinquishment was a relief, as if he’d been pulling an oxcart his whole life and had just walked over a cliff into free fall. He didn’t know how to reconcile this feeling with all the others—with the dread, with the regret and guilt about his daughter and Devi. His mind seemed to be fracturing into prisms, like a piece of quartz struck with a hammer. Each piece refracted the world differently, and cohesion had become impossible. Was this really new, or had he just failed to realize it until desperation and despair made it plain? There was argument inside his head, even a kind of war, as if the violence outside had finally kicked down the doors and stormed in, knocking everything askew.

He’d hold out hope until the very end, he couldn’t help it. And even though he probably wouldn’t pray, he wasn’t above a little bargaining. If you took man to be made in God’s image, this made more sense, anyway. Mercy was in short supply, but commerce was common as dirt and understood by everyone.