Beyond the Summit (10 page)

Nima tugged the back of Dorje’s shirt and whispered, “What is it? A
pem
?”

“Don’t know,” Dorje whispered back. “Maybe a witch cursed them.”

Mingma spoke. “There’s salt tea and
thukp
a on the hearth. Take what you want.”

After two days of hunger, the promise of noodle dumplings in potato stew flavored with sheep fat overrode fear and revulsion. They agreed to eat and stay the night. When the hearth fire burned out, Droma Sunjo put mats on the floor for Dorje and Nima. Mingma didn’t join her in the sleeping alcove but lit a butter lamp and sat on the window seat with two piles of Tibetan scripture on the low table before him. Reciting the text in a low monotone, he moved the pages with both hands from one pile to the other. Although Dorje lay in the familiar room, it wasn’t the same with these two strangers. He no longer knew the father he had longed to see and couldn’t jump into his lap to soak up his warmth or feel him gently stroking his forehead. As Dorje watched Mingma, the flame from the butter lamp cast shadows across his father’s face, making him appear more distant and removed. If only Dorje could take back those first few words in the teahouse.

Lost in those memories, he now plodded up the hill until Ruth’s scream jolted him back to reality. Whipping around, he saw Helen on the ground inches from a 500-foot cliff. “What happened?”

“I will carry you.” With no
doko
available, he squatted and told her to hang onto his neck with her legs around his waist, the way he’d carried Nima when young.

“I will be too heavy.”

“No. Much lighter than a porter’s load.” He rose and shifted her weight to make them both comfortable and continue upward.

Assuming the slow but steady gait adopted by porters, Dorje and Ruth arrived with Helen. As he walked into Namche, he realized nothing had changed since his first day back four years ago. Neither he nor his father had bridged the chasm created that night and probably never would. The two ladies waved their walking sticks over their heads with such bravura that Dorje swallowed the proud tears welling in his throat. He took Helen to her tent and instructed the cook to boil water for tea and biscuits because she wasn’t doing well.

Beth joined them and asked if there was a doctor nearby. Staring straight into her wild-blue-poppy eyes, he told her of the hospital in Khunde built by Hillary just two years earlier.

Having warned Eric about going too fast
,
Dorje contained the chuckle gurgling in his throat. The man deserved to get sick but Helen didn’t, and she was his priority. Here was a chance to be alone with Beth for several hours. Of course he’d take her but not with Eric tagging along. “Eric is sick from going too high too fast. Khunde is even higher. He must rest here today and tomorrow, but I will take you to ask about Helen.”

While Beth talked to Eric and prepared to leave, Dorje rushed down to the spring. Two Sherpanis slapping clothes against the rocks giggled and flirted with him as he dunked his head in to wash his hair and splashed ice-cold water on his face. Another time, he might have returned their attention, but not today. The American with honey-golden hair consumed all his thoughts.

Crawling into the tent, Beth found Eric face down on his sleeping bag, breathing heavily as if struggling for air. “Still feeling rotten?”

“I’m sorry, Sweetie,” she said and lightly ran the back of her hand down his cheek. “Rest and keep drinking fluids.” If she told him about planning to hike higher yet today, he’d throw an understandable fit. Best to just let him sleep undisturbed.

She waited outside for Dorje as he walked up from the spring with glistening, wet hair. Watching his confident stride, she wanted to know everything about him. What was his childhood like? Was he married or did he have a girlfriend? What drove him to despair and what brought him happiness? Rarely hesitant about probing into someone’s personal life, she had offended a number of people with her directness. So once again she had to wrestle her brazen tongue into place and stick to cultural and historical questions, the stuff she was paid to do. Asking about the hospital, she learned that before Hillary built the one in Khunde, the nearest doctor had been eight days away. Slightly nauseated and plagued by a headache by the time they reached the long stone building overlooking the village, she was much too stubborn and independent to admit to such weakness.

When she announced she was doing a story about Sherpas, the volunteer doctor from New Zealand proudly showed her the facility and said that during the smallpox epidemic of 1963, Hillary had donated medicine to eradicate the feared scarring disease. He explained that yak caravans had made the yearly arduous journey to Tibetan salt fields until the Chinese closed the border in 1959. Landlocked and many miles from the sea, both lands contained iodine-barren soil. “So for generations, thyroid conditions such as goiters and cretinism infected the entire Khumbu. Hillary gave iodine injections, but some of the villagers refuse to take them.”

A curious wrinkle crawled across Beth’s face. “Why on earth not?”

His voice slid to a murmur out of Dorje’s hearing. “Because they still don’t trust our medicine. Some believe needle holes create openings for an evil being, a
pem
, to enter.”

“But surely you’ve explained everything to them.”

“Of course, many times over but to no avail. My sole success has been adding
cretin
to their vocabulary. A large percentage of the population in the isolated village of Phortse suffers from both conditions.” Frustration settled in his eyes. “I guess I can’t blame them. Tuberculosis is rampant here. I treat them but as soon as they feel better, they stop taking the medication, get sick again, and frequently die. My explaining they have to continue the full course falls on ears as deaf as those of a cretin.”

Aware of Dorje’s eyes on her while she took notes, Beth wondered what he was thinking. Was her hair a mess? An old habit, she toyed with the ends, curling them around her finger. When he stretched after leaning against a table, she decided he was tired of dealing with tourists and impatient to leave. She quickly thanked the doctor for the interview and the pills to help Helen adjust to the altitude.

“If it means so much to her and she’s feeling better after two day’s rest in Namche,” he added, “she could probably be transported to Tengboche.”

Dorje was standing outside with one foot on the rock wall leading to the hospital, his arm resting on his knee, the Levis tight across his rear. “If you are finished, Memsahib, we will go back now a different way.”

Hands deep in his pockets and staring straight ahead, he didn’t appear open to conversation. And for once in her adult life, Beth restrained her tendency to strip someone bare of all his secrets. Notepad out again, she described Khumjung’s
chorten
at the village entrance as Dorje explained it contained sacred items or the ashes of lamas. The square base was the earth, the bell-shaped dome was water, and the spire at the top with thirteen pieces was the thirteen steps leading to Buddhahood. Biting her lips to suppress a smile, she realized he didn’t know the word
enlightenment
and she didn’t want to humiliate him with a correction. Instead, she recorded images of the sacred Mount Khumbila that formed a dramatic backdrop to the village and the ice-chiseled mountain, Thanserku.

“Can we see Everest from here?”

“No, but I will show you.” Knees bent, his head and shoulders always level, Dorje seemed to glide down the rocky slope without touching the ground. When they arrived at the crest of a hill overlooking a valley, he announced, “This is where
mikarus
come to take pictures of Everest.”

“
Mikarus
?”

He turned towards the distant mountains and held his hands in the shape of a triangle. “The one that looks like this behind the wall of Nupste. That is Lhotse on the right and over there Ama Dablam. It means mother’s jewel box because the ridges look like a mother’s arms reaching out. Tomorrow Eric will come and take pictures of you and the ladies.”

“And you? Will you stand here beside me for a picture?”

“Many
mikarus
want pictures of Sherpas.”

But you’re not just any Sherpa,
almost escaped but she snatched the words as they raced towards her lips and said simply, “Because you are all so kind to us.” Like Eric, she had gone too far too fast and must turn down a different path now or risk scaring him away. As the sun crept below the ridge of the western mountains, Beth sat down and hugged her knees to her chest. “For years I’ve dreamed of being here and seeing Everest. This is a very special moment for me.” From below the horizon, the sun glowed in distant clouds, infusing them with a flaming orange tinged with purple along the frayed edges. As the color slowly faded to copper, the peaks took on a golden hue.

Seeming a little more relaxed, Dorje sat beside Beth maintaining as much distance as possible on the narrow rock. “I like to watch Everest too. I came here with my father when I was very young.”

A hint of his past? She couldn’t let that sneak by unnoticed. Knowing full well that he had left Namche for ten years, she still asked, “Didn’t you come often while growing up?”

She’d seen the area on maps: the southern region of the Solu-Khumbu. Namche was in the north. “How many days walking . . . Sherpa time, not mine,” she asked with a smile.

“Four days adult steps. Seven for small, tired children of three and six.”

She waited for more but the air was silent. Even the birds had stopped singing. Years of gleaning information from people had taught her the most effective way to get someone to open up was to reveal herself showing she wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable and was willing to talk of the dark places she’d been. Sensing a nonjudgmental ear, most people bared their souls willingly. An expert at body language, Beth had recognized an uneasiness when Dorje spoke of his father. So she headed in that direction, uncertain of the cultural boundaries she would have to cross.

“It’s hard when life turns your childhood upside down,” she said quietly and then paused to gauge his reaction. Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he stared ahead, hands clasped in front. Had she touched something or was this a Sherpa’s way of politely telling a
mikaru
enough conversation? As the glow on the mountain dimmed to silver in the dying sun, the sky darkened and she knew she might not have this chance again.

“My father left when I was seven,” she continued. His face a mixture of doubt and surprise, he looked back at her. “And he never returned. I used to sit at the window every day waiting for him to lift me into the air saying I was his sweet lovebird and we would fly to all the places we dreamed of. But it never happened.”

“So now you fly with Eric,” he answered with an insight that caught her completely off guard. This job, all the men in her life. What a revelation and coming from someone she was trying to penetrate. How could she have not realized she was still waiting and searching for her father? Perhaps she was too close to see.