Exiles (13 page)

“I don’t think I love her because she’s a woman, exactly,” Alex said. “I love her because she’s
Devi
. I think I’d love her just as much if she were a guy.”

“I understand that, I think,” Peter said.

Devi had gone home with Sangita after dinner, so Peter and Alex had leashed up Wayne Lee and taken her for a walk through a nearby neighborhood.

“What do you love about her?”

“All the obvious stuff,” she said. “She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s incredibly tough. I thought
I
was an athlete, but we’ve been taking hikes in the foothills after she gets off school, and she puts me to shame.”

“Well, honey, she’s
Tibetan.
”

“Even so, it’s humbling, and I don’t like humbling,” she said. “What’s so special about Tibetans, anyway?”

“They’ve got hemoglobin levels and a whole oxygen-delivery system that’s miles beyond ours. Vertical miles, literally.”

“She once said she has a mountain heart,” Alex reflected. “I don’t think she was talking about physiology, though.”

The evening was cool. Windows turned orange in houses and apartments as lights came on inside. A big 747 drifted in over the valley, on final approach, its lights blinking red and white. The roar of its engines echoed back and forth between the hills, growing loud, then soft, then loud again, like ocean waves swirling and chuffing between cliffs.

“That is the weirdest thing,” said Alex.

“What?”

“Two or three months ago I would have felt like the plane was normal and the goat was weird. Somewhere along the line I switched sides.”

Peter knew what she meant. He was now able to spot other Americans a block away, and not by their clothes, because Canadians and Brits and Australians dressed pretty much the same way. (The Germans he could always tell because they had a peculiar habit of wearing shorts and sandals with dark socks, and sometimes even knee socks.) But a lot of the Americans looked kind of dead in the eyes. They would walk the streets purposefully, their wallets poised, buying brass trinkets and folk art and often seeming to genuinely experience nothing. It made Peter uncomfortable, because once he became aware of it, he realized other people probably saw it too.

There were nice Americans of course, and some of them had done a lot of good. There was a couple from Oregon who’d spearheaded the conversion of the
tempo
fleet from diesel engines to electric motors, and earnest students of Buddhism, and a woman from Sausalito named Olga, who’d started a program that gave poor villagers alternatives to selling their daughters as domestic slaves. But the tourists were a distinct breed. Peter had lived his whole life in his home country and somehow never noticed that look until he saw it in contrast to people who were different.

They passed the floodlit grounds of the Australian embassy, then took a couple of turns and found themselves on quiet, deserted streets without lights, unpaved and fronted by small shops and ramshackle houses. Wayne Lee came to full attention and picked up her pace.

“I should have brought a flashlight,” Peter said. “I have no idea if it’s safe here.”

Alex straightened her shoulders and looked around. “Let’s keep going.”

He’d always liked her courage, but after a few minutes they heard scufflings and he began to have doubts. He thought he saw movement behind them, flowing dark shapes low to the ground. Wayne Lee broke into a trot, and he struggled to rein her in.

“What the hell
is
that?” asked Alex.

“I don’t know, but I’m not liking it and neither is the goat.”

He felt a surge of adrenaline. They were moving quickly, but the living shadows moved with them. The street branched, and one fork led back to the main road, about a hundred yards away, where there was light.

“Take a right,” Peter said, but the things followed.

“Dogs,” said Alex. “It’s a dog pack.”

“They want Wayne Lee.”

They started running. The dogs closed the distance and were nearly on them when a figure suddenly darted out from the shadows. It was a boy, yelling in Nepali. They halted, and the dogs quickly surrounded them. The boy walked in a circle, keeping himself between them and the dogs, brandishing a long, heavy stick. The dogs snapped at it, but he was quick; he’d pull it away at the last second, then slap them on the nose with it.

“You have a bit of trouble, I think, mister sir,” said the boy, his English heavily accented.

Peter asked him what they should do, and he told them to bend down and pretend they were each picking up a rock. They did as he said, and the dogs immediately backed off a couple of feet.

“Follow me, please,” he said. “Keep your arms up, like you are going to throw the rock. You, girl, in the rear, please to face behind you. Arm up.”

Crablike, they shuffled their way down the narrow lane. Wayne Lee, bleating and shivering with fear, shat prodigiously. Alex—in
addition to walking sideways, keeping her arm up, and watching the dogs—did her best to avoid the goat shit, often unsuccessfully.

As they approached the lit street, though, one of the dogs lunged at the boy, briefly grabbing the stick in its jaws. The boy stepped back, which pulled the dog toward him, then shoved the stick down the dog’s throat. It gagged and opened its jaws for an instant, and in that moment the boy yanked the stick back out of its mouth and smacked it on the snout. The dog snarled and lunged again, and this time the boy clobbered it hard over the skull. It yelped and scuttled back to the pack.

They kept moving, the dogs still with them, but the strategy was working; as they approached the light, their pursuers began hanging farther and farther back, and by the time they reached the paved road, the dogs had melted into the black gloom like djinns.

The three of them stood under a flickering yellow streetlight, sweating in the cool air, as the panicked goat continued to bleat. The boy’s eyes gleamed in his dark face.

“Who
are
you?” Peter asked, astonished at this intercession.

“I am Raju,” the boy said. He stuck out his hand, and they shook.

“Thank you, Raju. You saved our necks.”

The boy was about twelve, barefoot, and he wore a loose Madras shirt that hung askew because he’d buttoned it wrong. His pants were held up with an old piece of nylon climbing rope and had a carefully stitched patch over one knee. How to account for this discrepancy? The tidy patch with its tight whipstitch, the shirt one button off. Peter wondered how long ago the patch had been applied, and what had happened to the woman who sewed it.

He realized that even as he was sizing up Raju, the boy was doing the same to him.

“It is not wise to walk here at night, certainly not with an animal,” he said, sounding cheerful for a kid who had just faced down a pack of feral dogs with an old stick. He whirled the stick around him nonchalantly, and Peter couldn’t help noticing how
graceful and economical his movements were, as if he’d been training all his short life with some dog-stick master for just this moment. He saw Peter watching him and smiled.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Peter asked. His heart was finally slowing down.

“You are American?”

“Yes.”

Raju swished the stick back and forth in front of him, thinking. “Why does an American have a goat, if I may demand of you?”

Peter smiled at Raju’s formal, almost-correct schoolboy English. The boy’s parents must have struggled to get him some sort of education. “We live here now,” he answered.

Raju shrugged his narrow shoulders in that unique Nepali way—resigned to fate, making the best of the situation, the physical expression of
ke garne
. “I suppose if you are American you may give me rupees as a token of your appreciation,” he said, sounding a little unconvinced, as if he’d only heard rumors of this odd custom.

Peter handed over all his cash and then remembered with chagrin what he’d just been thinking about Americans and their wallets. Raju grew wide-eyed and looked around a little fearfully.

“Sir, if a policeman should see this he will think I am a robber. This will buy my whole family food for a month.”

“Good,” Peter said. He asked Raju if he knew where the Phwoof clinic was. Raju shook his head, so Peter described it to him. “If you ever need anything, Raju, if someone in your family is sick, come find me there.”

|   |   |

Ten days later Devi worked with Alex to translate the response from Lama Padma.

“You recall our beloved Mr. Bahadur?” asked Franz.

“How could I forget?”

“He is quite exercised, and it turns out he is
zuhälter
of choice to a wide spectrum of government ministers and muck-a-mucks in the army.”

Peter was astonished. “Are you telling me that a government with an armed insurrection on its hands is actually getting bent out of shape over the tribulations of an aggrieved pimp?”

“The power of such men lies in their ability to inflict damage,” Franz said. “They can end marriages and careers with a word.”

Franz had acquired a stray cat, which he’d named Wittgenstein in honor of the philosopher from his hometown. Wittgenstein jumped up onto the desk and started rubbing his face against Franz’s hand, bit him affectionately, then lay down under the lamp.

“In any case, I’ve had to placate them,” Franz muttered, petting the cat and looking slightly guilty.

“Which means what?”

Franz cleared his throat. “We have a small satellite clinic out in
Jorpati, near Boudhanath, that serves the monks and nuns in the monasteries there.”

Peter considered this. “That’s a workable commute, right? What would it take, an hour?”

“You’ll be on call when you aren’t in the clinic. It’s important that you live nearby.”

Peter stared at him. “I’m being
exiled
?”

“Just till things cool down.”

“How about I quit and save you the trouble?”

“Admit defeat?” Franz asked. “Take your ball and go home?”

“My balls, more like it, instead of handing them to you.”

Franz blinked enigmatically. “Of course, there’s the matter of your daughter. I understand she’s quite happy here now.”

Peter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sangita,” he said. “You sent her as a spy?”

“Not at all,” said Franz. “But she cooks for me too, and with a little effort one can draw her out.”

Peter got up and went to the window. The invasion of privacy notwithstanding, he knew Franz was right; Alex was happier with Devi than he’d ever seen her. If they left the country now she’d be even more upset than when he brought her over. Then there was the matter of Bahadur; was Peter just going to roll over and go belly-up for some lard-ass hustler? The more he thought about it, the more he realized there was all kinds of unfinished business here, and home seemed less appealing than ever. He put his hands in his pockets and studied the floor.