Exiles (24 page)

They came out of the trees and rhododendrons at about noon and, despite the altitude, it was hot. They stopped in the shade by a stream and picked off more leeches. Ramesh opened his pack and brought out a piece of flatbread, which he smeared with goat butter and passed around. The other guard broke Alex’s Luna bar into five pieces and handed them out. Peter was about to dunk his head into the water when Ramesh waved him off.

“He says if you do that you’ll end up with leeches in your ears and nose,” Devi said. “They’re tiny until they start sucking.”

Peter shuddered, remembering the girl at the clinic. And the clinic, in turn, reminded him of Mina—who, he realized, expected him to be on the chopper, and who would now assume he was dead. Depending on how this went, she might end up being right.

They pressed on toward the pass as thunderheads grew in a clear afternoon sky and heat lightning flashed inside them. Low, rumbling booms echoed among the ridges. An hour later, without dropping any rain, they dissipated.

Devi walked up ahead, speaking with Ramesh in Nepali from time to time. Peter couldn’t tell what their connection was, but she was smart, and he trusted her. They crossed the pass in mid-afternoon and started down. A couple of hours later they came to a village compound tucked in among trees and cliffs. It would be almost invisible from the air, Peter realized.

There were maybe a hundred and fifty guerrillas, most of them as young as the group that had been on the raid. Cattle and goats dotted the small terraced fields outside of town, and smoke curled from chimneys in the early-evening light. Devi said that this had been just another village before the local Maoist leader had appreciated its strategic location and taken it over. Most of the original inhabitants had fled, but those who remained had been put together in three or four small houses so they could be watched.

On small peaks and rock outcrops surrounding the town stood
batteries of machine guns, rocket launchers, and even a couple of small surface-to-air missiles, which must have been hauled up the mountain with considerable effort. Almost everyone carried a gun—M-16s, Kalashnikovs, and Belgian submachine guns they’d captured from the RNA.

Peter and the girls were paraded through town, but Peter sensed more curiosity than hostility. There were probably people here who had never seen a Westerner before, and Alex was drawing considerable attention from the young men. She wrapped her arms around herself and walked with her eyes on the ground ahead of her nervously. They passed a crude mural on the side of a building that showed the outward-gazing faces of five men: the Nepali guerrilla leader Prachanda, along with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—a sort of communist Mount Rushmore.

At the base of a hill behind town, Ramesh and the other guard handed them off to four men, all of them with Kalashnikovs, who led them up a steep path. They came to a modest house with a sweeping view of the valley. The guards gestured for them to take off their shoes and go inside. The house was just one big room, with a kitchen area in the back and windows overlooking the village. There were a couple of bookshelves, a few chairs, and kerosene lanterns hanging on hooks, but otherwise it was spartanly furnished.

Commandant Adhiraj sat at a table, eating dinner with a couple of his lieutenants. He was in his early forties and clean shaven, with graying hair. He had narrow shoulders but strong-looking hands and was significantly heavier than anyone else Peter had seen in the village. Someone, at least, was eating well.

Peter had once seen a photo of the young Pol Pot and been amazed that a man with such kind eyes could have turned, over time, into a killing machine. He’d had a similar reaction to a picture of Stalin, who looked like a kindly uncle. He half expected Adhiraj to present in some similar vein, then, with at least a pretense of joviality, perhaps a warm welcome to join the dinner. Instead, the commandant looked up when they came in but said
nothing. His dark eyes, behind wire-rimmed aviator glasses, were widely spaced, intelligent, and cool. He was deliberate and unhurried as he turned his gaze to the man on his right, then went back to his meal.

He reminded Peter of a tough, pragmatic, and rapacious American businessman he’d once known. Adhiraj had similar eyes, distant and even slightly hostile, and his small mouth and pursed lips suggested impatience and the kind of temper Peter didn’t like seeing in someone with easy access to automatic weapons. He was probably an effective administrator, which was the last thing Peter expected from a man who was supposed to be instilling the masses with revolutionary fervor. This would, however, explain how he had, within ten years, helped his leader Prachanda build a movement from a ragtag band of juvenile delinquents and outlaws into a formidable force that had nearly overrun the country.

When Adhiraj finished eating and his lieutenants had departed, he wiped his mouth and spoke to his guards. They brought Peter to the table and motioned for Devi to come over so she could translate. Alex sat in the corner and pulled a book out of her pack—the only possession they’d allowed her to keep.

Adhiraj spoke to Devi. “He wants to know if you are really an American doctor,” she said.

Peter nodded. “Ask him what the problem is.”

Adhiraj responded impatiently that he’d felt unaccountably weak for some time. In the past few months he’d fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, usually a couple of hours after eating. He’d also been getting sores on his feet that took a long time to heal.

“Is it all right if I examine him?”

Adhiraj nodded. Peter found nothing noteworthy except his heft; he was only about five-eight but must have weighed more than two hundred pounds, which by Nepali standards was tremendously obese.

“Is he thirsty?”

“He says yes, he is thirsty very frequently now.”

“How often does he urinate?”

When Adhiraj heard the question he looked at Peter with vexation, as if it were in poor taste to embarrass him in front of the girl. Finally, he spoke.

“Every couple of hours,” Devi said.

Peter explained that he was pretty sure Adhiraj had diabetes. Devi translated, and the commandant appeared surprised. He spoke sharply to Devi.

“He says this is ridiculous,” Devi said. “No one here has diabetes. He has heard of it only occasionally in people who move to the city and grow old. He considers it a disease of decadence, which is why so many Americans have it.”

“Look,” said Peter. “Everyone in this camp is younger, leaner, and fitter than he is.”

Devi’s eyes widened. “You want me to translate that?”

“Tell him.”

She spoke, and Adhiraj shrugged without taking noticeable offense. “He says he spends most of his time behind a desk now,” Devi said.

“He’s gained a lot of weight recently?”

“He says yes. Even three years ago he was much thinner than he is now.”

“Tell him so many Americans have it for the same reasons he does,” Peter said. “It isn’t decadence, just too much food and too little exercise. His body can’t process glucose the way it did when he was younger and more active.”

Devi spoke to him. “He says he really isn’t interested in all this medical theory. He wants to know what he is supposed to do.”

Peter said it was simple: He should eat less and exercise. Beyond that, there were drugs available in Kathmandu that would help. “If he has someone there who can get them for him, that would be good,” he added. “I’ll give him the information.”

Adhiraj got up and walked to the window, then gestured for Peter to join him. The lights of his village spread out below like a little fiefdom. There were a couple of bonfires in the streets, with
dark figures moving around them. Across the valley, the snowcapped peaks were losing the last of their alpenglow.

“It’s beautiful here, is it not?” said Adhiraj.

Peter looked at him, startled. “You speak English?”

“Sometimes it is useful to maintain a pretense,” he said. “But it appears you are who you say you are, so I doubt I will gain significant intelligence from you.” Adhiraj called the guard in and told him to take Devi away. “Your daughter may remain here,” he said. “But I wish to speak with you about something more important than this diabetes.”

The guard took Devi out. Adhiraj and Peter went back to the table while Alex continued reading in the corner, careful to keep her eyes on the page. Adhiraj poured wine for both of them and sat down. Peter, still standing, took a sip; it was, surprisingly, a reasonably good merlot. Adhiraj seemed more relaxed now that his day’s work was over, and he leaned back in his seat. He gestured at the other chair. Peter sat.

“I would like to know how the Americans see our movement,” he said.

Peter wasn’t sure how frank he could afford to be. “I don’t mean to offend you,” he said, “but these days people are a lot more concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Adhiraj sighed. “I had thought perhaps this was true.”

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Peter said. “If there was oil here and the CIA considered you a threat, this village would be a crater by now.”

Adhiraj smiled. “You must be considered very left-wing in your country, Doctor.”

“I think I’m pretty much in the middle of the road where the rest of the world is concerned.”

Adhiraj pressed his index finger to the table and rotated it back and forth, idly, as if crushing a bug. “Here we say that those in the middle of the road get hit from both directions.”

Peter had another drink of wine to steady his nerves. It was a
little like a job interview, he realized—a casual pretense obscuring how much was at stake.

“My followers are, for the most part, about the age of your daughter,” Adhiraj continued. “They have enthusiasm, but they are not particularly knowledgeable.”

“You could change that without a lot of trouble.”

Adhiraj smiled. “The ignorance or the enthusiasm?”

“The ignorance.”

“Too much thinking makes indecision,” he said. “We cannot afford it. Did you know that the annual per capita income in this country is less than three hundred dollars?”

“I did know, in fact.”

“And yet everyone in the royal family is able to afford a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley. I would think such a thing would offend the American sensibility.”

Adhiraj was expressing opinions pretty similar to Peter’s own, and Peter hoped he could steer things into sympathetic terrain. “It would have, until about the end of World War Two,” Peter said. “Since then, we’ve had royalty too. They’re largely above the law, they run things how it pleases them, and most of them don’t pay taxes.”

Adhiraj appeared surprised. “What sort of royalty is this?”

“Corporations,” Peter said, “and they’re worse than King George ever was. If a war is good for business, we have a war. If single-payer healthcare is bad for profits, we don’t have it. They control the debate and the airwaves, and it turns out to be surprisingly easy to scare people into going along.”

Adhiraj smiled thinly. “Perhaps we have some common ground, after all,” he said.

Peter was relieved to hear it. He was enjoying the wine and the chance to talk. He was also glad that Adhiraj seemed open to frankness.

“It’s not like I’m in your camp either,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs. “Communism is how all our tribal ancestors
lived for thousands of years, and it’s a beautiful idea. But it ought to be obvious that when the population grows beyond a certain point, it doesn’t work anymore.”

Adhiraj raised his eyebrows. “Why do you say this?”

“It’s human nature. When you live in a small group, it pays to act for the good of everyone because you get personal benefits from it.”

“Of course.”

“But when you no longer know those people, it makes more sense to look after your own self-interest, within reason. So then someone has to force people to participate in this fake bureaucratic altruism, and you end up with Stalin and Mao and Kim Jong-il.”

“So a society is either tribal or capitalist?” Adhiraj asked. “You consider those the only two options?”

“There’s capitalism and there’s capitalism,” Peter said. “It doesn’t have to be a shark tank, like the U.S. You can provide medical care, tax the rich, and get the money out of elections so the politicians do their jobs instead of whoring themselves to the highest bidder.”

Adhiraj emptied his wineglass and set it down. “And this would be your advice to me, should we succeed?”

Alex, over in the corner, cleared her throat ever so quietly. Peter knew it was directed at him, but he didn’t know why. He stopped to consider where this was going. He felt a little light-headed, admittedly, after the long day and the wine, but Adhiraj seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say, and he doubted any harm would come of being honest.

“My
first
advice, I suppose, would be to stop pillaging and killing people,” he said. “Folks out there aren’t real happy with you, as I’m sure you know.”

Adhiraj stared. “And yet my recruits grow by twenty or thirty every month,” he said, his voice even. “We are in a position to win the war before summer’s end.”

“Of course,” said Peter. “Your recruits seem loyal to you now.”

“
Seem
loyal?”

“Look, you take poor kids with no chances and you promise them food and shelter. That kind of obedience you can get from a dog. But if you kick out the king you’re going to have to
govern
this place, and it would be good if people were on your side out of choice rather than necessity.”

Adhiraj poured the last of the wine into his glass. “An interesting perspective, Doctor,” he said. He abruptly stood, walked to the door, and called his guard. He spoke to the guard briefly in Nepali.

“Please follow this man,” Adhiraj said to Peter and Alex. He turned and walked back to the table.

Peter, perplexed, looked at his daughter. She had turned pale. The guard led them down the hill to a small one-room house in the village. What had gone wrong? Was Adhiraj so thin-skinned?

There were nine or ten other people in the room, sitting against the walls or lying down. As soon as they were inside, Alex found Devi and put her arms around her.