Exiles (22 page)

Peter had been wondering about the changes he’d seen in Devi since her stay among the
anis
. She still laughed easily and kidded around with Alex, but something was stirring beneath the surface.

Wayne Lee bleated out back. The afternoon light fell through the kitchen windows as Peter chopped vegetables.

“Anything interesting happen at the monastery?” he asked, as neutrally as possible.

“Lama Padma asked me to translate for his California students while I was there,” she said. “Then word got around and more Westerners started showing up. By the end of the week I was sitting up in front with him and translating for, like, twenty people.”

Peter was astonished. “You must be the most modest person on earth,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged and got up to wash the beans. “It’s not really anything to be proud about,” she said. “It’s actually really nerve-racking. All these people are waiting, so you have to think quickly. There are a lot of specialized terms in Tibetan, and the same thing has different meanings in different contexts. I got stressed trying to keep it all straight.”

“What, for example?”

“Well, Alex told me once that Eskimos have about a hundred different words for snow. But Tibetans have all these words for
consciousness
, with a lot of subtle variations. Sometimes it’s hard to know which one they mean.”

“You’re happy, though?”

She smiled. “It’s what I like best, I think. Studying dharma, being with the lama. It feels like coming home.”

“If you’ve found your calling at eighteen you’ve got the rest of us beat.”

She fished through the drawer and picked out a knife. “You didn’t decide to be a doctor when you were young?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “I’ve never told Alex about this, though, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.”

“Okay,” she said, a little warily.

“After college I had an old Kawasaki with a cargo box on the back, and I spent a couple of years bombing around California and Oregon, climbing rock. I was lean and callused, and went pretty much unwashed for days at a time, but I don’t ever remember being happier.”

She looked at him. “But you quit? Why?”

He hesitated. “It was just time to,” he said.

He remembered very well why he’d quit, though. He’d been free-climbing a 5.9 pitch at Smith Rock, three hundred feet off the deck, when first one shoe slipped off the rock, and then a hand, and he swung slowly out away from the face like a door opening. He struggled to get a hand or a foot back on the rock, but he couldn’t move without risking his only foothold. He was adhered to the cliff face largely by force of will, and his leg was starting to shake with the strain.

His climbing partner, Dave, was talking to him in an urgent voice, but Peter couldn’t understand a word. Usually, if you fell while climbing, it was sudden. You either spidered out your rope or, if you were free-climbing, cratered before you knew what hit you. He’d never expected it to be slow like that, to give him time
to contemplate what was happening. The last of his strength drained from his arm, and his shoe started slipping, ever so slightly, off the nubbin that held it. He had maybe two or three seconds left and there was no longer anything to lose, so he managed one last effort, a dynamic swing over and a big reach, and somehow found a tiny handhold, just enough for two fingers, and then a foothold, and then he was facing the rock again. He carefully reattached himself and settled for a second, trying to get his breath. Stars twinkled at the corners of his vision, and for a few moments he thought he might pass out. He hung there, panting, for two or three minutes, afraid to move, as Dave talked to him from somewhere over on the right.

Peter looked and saw his friend ensconced in a big, comfortable-looking crack. At first Peter wasn’t willing to give up any of his holds, but he knew that sooner or later he’d have to. After another couple of minutes Dave talked him over, hold by hold, and then Peter got a foot, and then a hand, and then another foot into the crack. He brought in the last hand, astonished at this sudden deliverance.

The rock was warm. There was a breeze, and soon the sweat started to evaporate and cool him down. Dave advanced upward, then Peter moved up a little, too, and found another hold. Dave went ahead, talking to him in what seemed to be the language of birds. After a half hour or so they reached a ledge from which it was possible to traverse off the face and scramble down the back side of the cliff.

This kind of thing happened to all climbers sooner or later. If you were dedicated enough, you shrugged it off and kept going. Peter was not. That afternoon was the first time that he’d really understood, viscerally, that he was mortal, believed it in a way he could not dismiss as something distant and abstract. Once he’d felt the great, dark maw open under him, he lost any interest in tempting it further. He sold his gear rack the next week, but the nightmares he kept for years.

Standing there in the kitchen with Devi, all this came back so
vividly that his palms began to sweat. This beautiful young woman was chopping carrots, and he was here, alive.

“So if you just got tired of it, why didn’t you want Alex to know?” she asked.

“You’ve seen her play basketball,” he said quietly. “Climbing wasn’t something I wanted her fanatical about.”

That first week of April in 2006, when antigovernment riots broke out in Kathmandu, Peter went home and brought Alex and Devi in to the clinic. Mina, Usha, and the clinic’s two other nurses were already there. Anne and David drove the jeep in from Jorpati. By sundown they were swamped with the injured. When the house was full they laid people on mats in the backyard. They stitched lacerations, set bones, tamponaded broken noses, wired jaws. Rubber bullets had broken ribs and shattered facial bones, even blinded a couple of people.

Early in the day, the various opposition groups had joined together and called for a general strike. Tens of thousands of protesters pushed through the city, shutting down everything and eventually converging on the Royal Palace. There had always been an understanding that there would be no physical threat to the palace or the king, so this threw the army into a panic.

Peter and the girls scurried between the litters, doing their best to triage as people cried out and moaned and called for help. Franz shuffled around, checking for broken bones, and Mina moved
through the ranks, squatting and talking to people, trying to figure out what had happened to them. They transferred the really serious cases—compound fractures, bullet wounds, internal bleeding, and the like—to hospitals when they could, but one woman had miscarried, hemorrhaging badly, and three others died before any ambulances came. They started transporting people in oxcarts,
tempos
, and taxis. It was train-wreck military medicine.

They worked straight through the night, stopping in turns for food or coffee. At seven o’clock the next morning, when things finally started to settle down, Franz turned on the news. It was soon clear that the bloodshed had been unnecessary. The day before, the king had heeded his generals’ advice and taken his family to his country estate in the south. He hadn’t even been at the palace.

“Jesus,” said Franz. “All they had to do was tell them.”

The phone rang.

“Leave it,” said Mina. “It won’t be good news.”

Franz picked it up anyway.
“Scheisse,”
he said. He listened for a few moments, his eyes roving anxiously about the room. “They had to do this today? They couldn’t wait? Right. So where are they?”

He reached for a pad and jotted down a few notes, then hung up and turned to them. The call was a radio relay from the north. Two climbers had fallen on Annapurna and had been badly injured. They’d been moved down to a village a few miles from base camp, but they would have to be evacuated.

Peter was so exhausted his hands were shaking. “This should be the RNA’s job, or at least CIWEC’s,” he said.

“The CIWEC staff will be as done in as we are after last night,” Franz said. “Anyway, they can’t get a chopper.”

“How are we supposed to get one if they can’t?”

Franz looked at Mina.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m barely speaking to the old fascist as it is. Every time he hears rifle fire he does a little jig. I’m not asking him for any favors.”

The room fell silent. “All right, then,” said Franz. “I’ll tell them we can’t go.” He reached for the phone.

“Wait,” said Mina. “Just wait a minute.”

|   |   |

The colonel’s one condition was that his daughter not take the trip herself. Franz needed her, anyway, so Peter conscripted Alex as well as Devi, who had grown up near there and knew the dialect. Usha would stay with Mina while they were away.

Mina drove them to the airport. “You’ve got all your gear together?” she asked, sounding nervous.

“Sure,” he said. “Why?”

“Because time travel is real around here,” she said. “When you get out of the Kathmandu Valley you’re going to find yourself in the Middle Ages.”

At the drop-off, Alex and Devi got out and pulled their knapsacks from the trunk. Peter leaned over, and he and Mina kissed. The girls grinned at him when he got out of the car.

“You’re living in a glass house,” he said. “Not a word.”

They crowded into the chopper and put on headphones, which allowed conversation at a level slightly below the primal scream. The young pilot, Krishna, had trained in Germany, where the RNA sent most of its fliers. He fired up the engine, lifted off, and turned north.

As the morning warmed, strong updrafts started to knock the chopper around. Peter alternated between being flattened into his seat and feeling like he’d just been pushed out of a tenth-story window. Even Devi was a little green.

They followed valleys whenever they could, but occasionally they had to go up over ridges—high, serrated knife edges from which snowmelt fell in rainbowed plumes down to lush terraced fields. At the valley bottoms, rivers glinted, reflecting the sky. Alex, of course, hated to fly, and this was much worse than a 747.

The Himalayas looked like gigantic frozen tsunamis, white-capped
wave sets that receded into the distance under a luminous vault of blue. In geologic time they
were
tsunamis, shoved up by tectonic forces that rippled granite instead of water. If such mountains had a message, Peter reflected, it was simply that they would outlast all humans and anything they built, for the waves were still growing in size.

The chopper’s engine clattered and roared, sounding unreliable, as if important parts might be working themselves loose. After about a half hour they crossed a particularly jagged ridge, then banked sharply to the left. The helicopter leaned forward with a whine and began to fall. Alex grabbed Peter’s hand, and he put an arm around her, as if that would protect her when they hit the ground and were atomized.

Their descent slowed as they neared the earth, though, and the g-forces pressed them into their seats as they came in over a field where there was a metal hangar of some kind. Krishna swooped in, hovered, and set the chopper down. He cut the engine and opened his door.