Exiles (11 page)

But the fuse was lit, and it looked as if it was going to burn right down to the charge. Sangita’s whole being had transformed from her usual placid politeness into seething indignation, and Peter knew he’d misjudged her. She was more like Devi than he’d realized. Her body tensed, and her voice took on an acerbic edge. “When we come to Nepal, Sonam and I working in tea shop in Tamang, to north,” she said. “We stay four years, then the owner, he sick becoming. He give shop to us, we rooms adding, put in kitchen, some trekkers then come. Everything pretty fair okay.”

“Good for you,” said Peter.

“Then one day these people come; I don’t know word in English.…” She gestured as though she were carrying a rifle.

“Guerrillas?”

“Yes,” she said. “Maoists. Time to time, they come to village and take money and food. Not ask, just take. Then one day my son taking too.”

“They conscripted your son?”

She nodded. She set down the teacup but didn’t pick up the knitting. She interlaced her fingers, then pulled them apart again and placed her hands, palms down, on her knees. “I go find leader
and tell him give my son back. He laugh. He say he doing this for
my
benefit. I proletariat!”

“What did you do?”

Her right hand shot up and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I not very polite then. I say to this man—I charity needing not, just only my son. Then they come and take tea shop, throw us all out. We Kathmandu coming.”

“How long ago was this?” Peter asked.

“Six years. Devi still very angry, so I not much say.”

“I don’t understand why you pretend to be Nepali, though.”

Her hands still shook as she picked up her knitting again. “I Tibetan,” she said. “But here I speak Nepali, I know customs.” She pointed to the small red dot on her forehead. “I wear
bindi
. I took Nepali name and gave daughter one as well, though Sonam this much will not do.”

“But why?” Peter asked.

Tears brimmed in her eyes. “I afraid if Communists take over Nepal they will rape Devi like my sister, they will shoot us just like Chinese did.”

A slender girl of about fifteen was sitting on the exam table when Peter walked in. Mina was engaged in a heated discussion in Nepali with a middle-aged man who appeared to be the girl’s father.

“What’s the problem?” Peter asked.

“He wants to stay while we examine her.”

“Why’s she here?”

“Female trouble of some kind.”

“Out he goes. Tell him.”

The man chimed in with a deep, resonant voice. “I speak some English, Doctor,” he said. “I will not leave her alone with a strange man; it is not proper in my culture. I realize you Americans may not understand, but—”

Peter interrupted him. “Mr.—”

“Bahadur.”

“Mr. Bahadur, Mina will be here during the exam.”

“Yes, yes, she told me this. I’m sorry, but still it is not acceptable.”

“You’ve brought in your other daughters over the years,” Mina said. “You never insisted on staying before.”

Bahadur was a large man with a thick black beard and a potbelly, and he wore a traditional Nepali tunic with a Western sport coat over it. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and seemed agile, as if well oiled. His big hands moved fluidly in front of him in motions that suggested bargaining, or perhaps the deflection of blows. He shrugged as his eyes shifted between Peter and Mina.

“Before, the girls were always examined by nurses,” he said. “It was not an issue.”

“It’s not an issue now,” said Mina.

“I believe it is,” replied Bahadur.

Peter and Mina exchanged a look of consternation. The girl sat on the exam table, watching with canny dark eyes, her hands beside her and her expression inscrutable. Her legs were crossed at the ankles; a little copper bracelet just above her left foot gleamed dully against her cinnamon skin. Her eyes moved from Peter to Mina to Bahadur like translucent black stones, wary and alert.

“I understand your concern,” Peter said, even though he didn’t really understand it. “But I will not even ask this girl the color of her hair with you in the room.”

Bahadur smiled, just a bit sarcastically. “Surely, Doctor, you can
see
the color of her hair.”

Peter shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, poised. Bahadur took a small step back.

“One of two things is going to happen now,” Peter said. “You’ll leave so we can examine her, or you’ll take her to some other clinic.”

“Now look—” said Bahadur, but Mina cut him off.

“You will not take me seriously because I am a woman,” she said. She nodded toward Peter. “Maybe you will take
him
seriously, hm?”

Bahadur looked at the girl again, then shrugged in concession. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “I only meant to be of assistance. Please come get me if I can answer any questions.”

He strolled out of the room, head high with preposterous dignity. Peter left Mina with the girl and went to find Franz, who was in his office.

“Ah, Mr. Bahadur,” Franz said. “The man who shoots only X’s.”

“How many daughters does he
have
?”

“Let me pull the charts.” Franz went to the
B
cabinet and pushed away the thick tendrils of the plant that sat atop it, then rooted until he produced a stack of manila folders. He looked through them. “God, you do ask the right questions, don’t you?”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Eight counting the one you’ve got now,” said Franz. “I suppose it’s possible, if his wife is strong.”

Peter took the charts and looked through them. “Three or four of these birthdays are within six months of each other,” he pointed out.

Franz looked at the folders and grunted. “I doubt she’s
that
strong,” he said. He threw the charts on his desk.
“Scheisse,”
he said. “He’s a
zuhälter.
”

“A zoo what?”

“Procurer. Whoremonger.”

Peter leaned against the desk. “What do we do? What are the laws?”

“They are ambiguous, unfortunately,” Franz said. “I think it is technically all right for a woman to sell herself if she chooses, but no one else may take any of the money.”

“She’s about fifteen,” Peter said.

Franz sighed. “Even
that’s
complicated here because girls are often considered grown up at puberty.” He pulled a pencil from his pocket and drummed the eraser against his desk. “This is probably some country girl he bought from her parents. The police don’t care much for this kind of thing, especially if Bahadur pays them off, which I assume he does.”

“Agencies?”

“Long backlog.”

“Any ideas?”

“Let me think about it.”

Peter went back to the exam room and told Mina.

“This is the
eighth
?” she said. “I should have noticed. Damn it.”

“You see thirty patients a day, all week, all year,” Peter said. “He brought them in one at a time, not in a herd, and a couple of times his wife brought them. It was mostly mundane stuff, anyway, like eye infections and strep.”

“I still should have caught it. There’s no excuse.”

“Mina, you didn’t even see half of them. There were other initials on some of the charts.”

She turned to him. “You noticed whose
initials
were on the charts?” she asked, looking at him a little strangely.

He nodded.

Mina’s voice became uncharacteristically soft. “What do you want to do?” she asked. She sounded surprisingly conciliatory. The girl leaned forward on her arms and watched them intently.

“We probably ought to start with an exam and see if we can figure out what’s going on,” Peter said.

Mina nodded. “She’s complaining of pain and itching,” she said. “There’s some bleeding too, but apparently it isn’t menstrual.”

“Explain to her that I’ll need to have a look but that you’ll be right here and no one’s going to hurt her.”

Mina spoke to the girl, who shrugged as if she couldn’t care less what happened. That little casual lift of her shoulders chilled Peter more than anything he’d heard about her so far.

The girl’s vulva was red and swollen. She had active herpes lesions and a thick, foul-smelling discharge that suggested chlamydia, gonorrhea, or possibly some combination of both.

“No wonder Bahadur was nervous,” Peter said. “We’re not talking about a little sore throat here.”

“He thought you’d catch on but I wouldn’t?” Mina asked.

“Jesus.”

“Has she had a fever?”

Mina spoke to the girl and said yes.

“She must be miserable,” Peter said.

“What’s a little more agony to a girl like this?” Mina said, then sat down by the exam table. “God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s okay,” Peter said. He’d never heard her apologize. He rolled his stool away from the foot of the table and stood up.

“Let’s get her antibiotics, something wide-spectrum,” he said. “Famvir for her herpes—do we have any Famvir?”

“Yes.”

“And she should probably have an HIV test.”

“Did you see if she had warts on her cervix?” Mina asked. “There’s a lot of that too.”

“I didn’t see anything, but you should check if you want to.”

“No,” said Mina. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Peter realized the girl had been lying there without a flinch or a question the whole time he’d had the speculum inside her and while they’d been talking. She didn’t react in any way; in fact, she was absently biting her thumbnail, as if completely disconnected from anything that happened to her below the waist.

Part of what followed was predictable. They had her get dressed and called the police. The cops took Bahadur away with them, amid much of what Franz called
sturm und drang
. Bahadur shouted threats both subtle and explicit: He would be back; he would cause great bodily harm to everyone involved; he would put the clinic out of business. Franz, Peter, and Mina watched him go from the front doorway. Just as the cops put him into their car, Mina suddenly waved goodbye—festively, with a big, cartoony smile—which turned Bahadur crimson with indignation and made Peter laugh. They went back inside and explained to the girl what would happen next.

This led to the part Peter had not foreseen. When they told her that Bahadur would never bother her again, that they would send her to a place where she would be cared for, the girl began to cry. Her tears were not of relief or joy but of fury. She screeched and
struck out with her fingernails and tried to bite Mina. Peter grabbed her from behind and pinned her arms while she kicked at them. After a few minutes, she wore herself out and quit struggling, and he was able to let her go.

The girl sat in the chair, looking at the floor, wiping away the last of her tears and speaking in Nepali.

“She says Bahadur was the only man who was ever kind to her, who gave her enough to eat and kept her clean,” Mina said. “She knows two girls who were sent to orphanages, and they both hanged themselves there. She said orphanages are where girls like her go to die.”

“Tell her we’re sending her to some people who’ll try to get her into school,” Peter said. He had only the vaguest sense of what such places were like, but it was crucial to get her away from Bahadur. “Tell her she can also go back to her family if she wants.”

When the girl heard the translation of this she looked at Peter, spat, and launched into another angry soliloquy.

“She says why should she go home to the people who sold her in the first place?” Mina said. “They worked her half to death, and she never wants to see them again. As for school, she knows about these organizations. They promise, but most of the time they don’t deliver, and you end up living in bunk beds in a freezing dormitory with fifty other girls. She wants to go back to Bahadur, where she has her own room and an electric heater.”

“Tell her if she doesn’t have HIV already, she’ll have it soon, and that she won’t be able to afford the drugs. It’s a death sentence. I’m sorry.”

The girl spoke again, but Mina just turned away.

“What did she say?” Peter asked.

“Nothing.”

“You can tell me.”

Mina looked at him with tired eyes. “She says, ‘Fuck you, American doctor.’ ” The girl spoke again, and Mina smiled, just slightly. “She says she hopes your cock rots.”