Right of Thirst (22 page)

Early that afternoon, after we'd dozed fitfully for a few hours, the prospect of staying there for the night became intolerable. I wanted to get down, I wanted to get out of there, and I wasn't alone. Without even discussing it, we started packing up. Rai had emptied the packs onto the ground, and hesitated over the heavy jugs of kerosene. Ali, after all, had the stove.

“We might use it,” I said to Rai. He nodded, and stuffed the jugs back into the duffel.

The boy, for his part, had finally gone silent. He did not meet our eyes, but he'd wolfed down the meat, and drank, and washed himself like the rest. We busied ourselves with details, checking the ground, tying our drawstrings tight, filling our water bottles again, and blowing on our cold hands afterward.

And a few hours later, at the mouth of another canyon, in the shallows spreading out from the main channel, we found him. He lay half submerged, facedown on a gravel bar a few yards out from the bank. He was still strapped to the duffel. His head was underwater, as were his arms and legs—only his back, and part of the green duffel, could be seen. The smooth gray rocks on the bar were the size of eggs and melons.

Beyond him, the channel deepened and showed its speed, a
widow's peak of water running down the center, just starting to break.

Elise saw him first, and called out, pointing. Rai, though first in line, had missed him, and so had I, though he was out in the open, and fully visible. We all stopped when we realized what she was pointing at, then took off our packs and lowered them to the ground.

Rai shook his head, once, and suddenly he seemed very young to me, unprepared for what lay before us. General Said, I was sure, would not have batted an eye, but Rai was visibly shaken.

Ali would have to be pulled off the bar and through the shallows to the bank. Rai said a few words to the soldier. Both sat down and unlaced their boots, then rolled up their pants, their feet curiously pale and alike. The boy sat on the ground, rocking back and forth as he watched.

They pranced out awkwardly, slow and unsteady in the current, wincing at the cold and waving their arms for balance. The water came to their knees, rippling around their legs, and it might have been amusing had Ali not been lying dead a few feet away. They reached the bar, and stepped up on it beside him. The water rose above their ankles. It was clearly painful—each lifted one foot, then the other, up into the air, rapidly, as if standing on hot sand.

But still they hesitated for a moment before touching him. Finally, they grabbed the body by the shoulders, and tried to heave him off. But he was heavy, soaked through, pinned against the gravel bar by the current, and they only succeeded in lifting his back and part of his head—I caught a glimpse of black hair—above the surface. For a few moments they struggled with him, but then Rai straightened and said something to the soldier, though his voice was drowned out by the flowing water.

They crouched down, fumbling with the duffel bag and the straps, until the soldier pulled it free and lifted it, with a dripping curtain of water, wholly out of the river. Rai helped him, holding it to his chest, soaking himself, and the man turned and forced his arms through the straps. Then they both turned, and rushed back across the channel as quickly as they could. The pain was clear on their faces, and when they reached the bank, and the duffel bag fell on the ground with a wet, heavy cough, both of their feet were bloody and nearly white. They sat down in silence, and began rubbing them, first with their bare hands, then with a towel that Elise had quickly retrieved from her pack and handed them, rocking back and forth as their feet warmed.

Without the pack to weigh him down, Ali rode a little higher in the water—I could see his arms, waving and loose, and every so often his head would nod up out of the current for an instant before disappearing again.

Rai and the soldier exchanged a few words, and then, after a few minutes, they put their boots back on. Rai's chest was dark and wet from the duffel bag, and his face was thunderous.

“I never should have brought him,” he said. “I knew this. I should not have listened to her.”

“Listened to whom?” I replied, puzzled.

He blew on his hands, then glanced at me.

“My wife,” he said, reluctantly, as if regretting his words.

“Your wife? How did she know Ali?”

“He was her cousin,” Rai said, finally.

I didn't expect that at all. I never would have guessed that Ali was related by marriage to Rai. It completely surprised me.

“I'm sorry,” I managed, after a moment.

He didn't answer, only nodded to the soldier, and then they both waded off again into the water with their boots on.

They struggled and cursed. Ali was a wet mattress, loose and
slippery, and finally they simply grabbed fistfuls of cloth and dragged him without ceremony by the back through the shallows between them, stumbling on the uneven bottom. His head hung down, and left a wake. His legs flowed behind him. He seemed far heavier than he had been in life.

They paused at the edge of the bank, and then, grunting with effort, heaved his torso up and out of the water and onto the rocks. Then they stepped up beside him, reached down, and hauled him entirely onto the bank. Specks of gravel clung to his clothes, to his legs and back, to the matted, black mass of his hair—the river hadn't washed him clean. Instead, it had filled him with silt.

They left him there for a moment, catching their breath, but finally Rai bent down, and rolled him over by the shoulders as delicately as he could. His head followed, loosely, and for the first time I saw his face.

There he was—Ali, eyes cloudy, half open, expressionless. His slack jaw, his naked teeth, yellow and brown, above his patchy black beard, shot through with gray—a few scrapes, a bruise here or there, but otherwise his face was undamaged. I could read nothing there. No regret, no fear. It's always like that.

I was standing above him. But then I knelt down, and looked more carefully. The whites of his eyes were red, his pupils dark and empty. The gravel had left a fine tracery, like a watermark, on his cheek. His soaked clothes clung to the exact outline of his body—his thighs, the point of his hips.

I reached out and touched his neck, feeling for a pulse. It was more a reflex than anything, a kind of automatic act, the sort of thing one does at such moments.

His neck was very cold and firm, like a bag of flour left in a freezer. My finger left a dimple in the dead muscle, and I wiped
my hand on my leg after I touched him. Then I stood.

Elise watched, her hand clenched into a fist, which she held gently to her mouth. None of us said anything at first.

Then the boy started up. It was as if he'd been waiting, gathering himself for the effort. He ran to the body, and fell on his knees beside it, and began wailing. He bent to kiss his uncle's face, and stroked his beard. He tugged at the sodden clothes, and shouted up into the air while everyone else was quiet.

I couldn't watch it. I turned my back, and walked away alongside the river. There was no dignity there. He was only a boy, of course. But Ali was not his father, nor his brother; he was only an uncle, and I suspected that they didn't even live together in the city. I knew my thoughts were far too hard. The shock it gave us, the calamity that had now so visibly descended on him, on his wife and his nameless numbers of children—I didn't care about any of it right then. But if I'd come for a reduction to the essentials, I thought, surely I had found it.

Rai called out to me, and I turned and let him approach. He paused before me, then lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hands, inhaling deeply, before he said anything. For a long moment he looked entirely lost, bereft and shaken.

“I am not sure what to do,” he said, and I realized that he was asking me for advice.

“What do you mean?”

“I would like to carry him down,” he said. “So that his family can have him. This is important to us.”

“Do you think it's possible?”

He looked out over the river.

“I don't know,” he said.

I thought about it. We had days of walking left. Even in the cold, the body would start to decay. I imagined the soldier, and Rai, and perhaps even myself and the boy, our packs discarded,
struggling with him across the rough trail, as he began to stink and blacken and drip. It was not something I could face.

“We would have to leave a lot behind,” I said.

He nodded. I wondered what Rai would have done had he not been related, however distantly, to the figure on the bank, and how much this fact revealed about him—his past, his poverty and struggle, his desire to be something other than what he was, in a world where the lines of class were never crossed. And there he was, in his army sweater, with that pistol on his hip, trying to cross them anyway.

“I think we should bury him here.”

“It will be difficult to bury him,” Rai said. “We have nothing to dig a grave. It is all stones.”

“Then we'll have to cover him with rocks. We can put him at the base of the cliff.”

Rai was uneasy, shifting from foot to foot, not meeting my eye.

“It is not a proper burial,” he said. “There will be animals.”

“I don't know what else we can do. We could cremate him, I suppose. We could use the kerosene.”

Rai shook his head.

“That is forbidden,” he said. “We do not do this.”

“Why is this so important to you?” I asked him, carefully. “Is it because he was your wife's cousin? Or because you're blaming yourself?”

Rai ran his hand through his hair.

“He was clumsy,” he said. “He was not paying attention. He is a foolish man. He was not carrying so much. It is God who decides this. But I should have known this anyway. I should have been more careful with him. So I am blaming myself, Doctor. I am blaming myself for everything. I told my wife I would help him and I did not.”

He looked out at the river, then shook his head, and threw his cigarette down on the ground.

“We can't carry him down,” I said. “We don't even have a stretcher. His body will decompose. So we either bury him or cremate him. Wouldn't your family understand that?”

“This is a very bad thing for them,” he replied. “He supports them. His wife, his children. Now there is nothing for them.”

“What else can we do?”

He shook his head.

“There is something,” he said, quickly, as if to get through it. “We can call a helicopter.”

It hadn't occurred to me. He had his satellite phone.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“There is a problem, however,” he continued, in the same tone. “He was not a soldier. He is only a cook.”

“So,” I said, understanding at last. “They will not come unless we pay. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Rai said, lighting another cigarette. “We cannot call the army. But we can call a civilian one.”

“Then call them,” I said. “I'll pay for it.”

“It will cost two thousand pounds,” he said.

“I don't care,” I said.

“Thank you,” Rai said, and for an instant he looked as if he might weep.

I imagined a long wait—a day, or even more. I imagined Ali, wrapped up and guarded against the animals at night. I imagined we were farther away.

Rai looked carefully at the map, and made the call from high on the hillside. There was no signal in the narrow valley, and so he climbed. Elise and I watched him, sitting a safe distance from Ali on our packs.

The soldier, meanwhile, went through Ali's duffel. We watched as he spread the contents out on the ground a few feet away. Tins of food. Pots, silverware. A blanket, and finally a few belongings—a black plastic comb, a cheap digital watch. A few pairs of blackened, threadbare socks. A blue polyester hat, a hand mirror. All of it soaking and dripping.

At the bottom of the pack, folded carefully, wrapped in a plastic bag, was my fleece shirt. The soldier laid it on the gravel. He looked up at me, questioning. I shook my head, and pointed to him.

“You can have it,” I said.

He understood me well enough, and smiled, bowing his head at me. He lifted the shirt by the shoulders, and shook it, as one would a wet towel, held it at arm's length, and looked at it with a critical, appraising eye. He rolled the fabric between his fingers, then stood,
and carefully draped the shirt across a nearby boulder, where it could dry in the sun.

Ali's nephew, if he noticed any of this, gave no sign. He sat by himself, staring dumbly off at the river, no doubt worn out by his display. A few minutes earlier Elise had tried to approach him, but he had not responded. He had simply shaken his head, and stared at the ground, and after a while she'd given up. Only the soldier, it seemed, had been able to offer him some measure of comfort, and now he was fingering my shirt and smiling with pleasure.

I didn't really want to think about my shirt, wrapped like a precious thing, in the bottom of Ali's pack. I didn't want to think about how little he had, or how pathetic and small it all seemed. He lay covered in a blanket now, his legs protruding from beneath it. I watched him for a while, then looked up again at Rai, a tiny figure high on the side of the ridge. He was descending toward us. As the minutes passed, we sat there, not speaking, watching his approach.

“They will be here in two hours,” he said, when he reached us. “So we must get ready.”

“Two hours?” I asked, incredulous. “I thought we'd have to wait until tomorrow.”

“What time is it?” Elise asked.

“It is three p.m.,” he said. “We will be in the city by seven. Maybe eight. But it will be light enough to fly.”

It was very hard to believe, sitting there in the empty canyon, with no sign of anyone anywhere, with only the river, the rocks and distances, the sky above us, after all this walking and struggling. I could hardly conceive of it.

We waited, not saying much. Rai and the soldier spent some of the time rolling Ali up in a blue plastic tarp dug out of the soldier's pack, then tying it tight with a length of cheap white
nylon rope. He looked vaguely like a rug when they were done. The tarp was large enough to wrap him completely, and they wound the rope around him over and over again. It was unpleasant to watch—Rai, on his knees, straddling the body, cinching the rope as tight as he could, then handing the loose end to the soldier, who lifted Ali by the feet, and flicked the rope under him for Rai to grab once more. Soon Ali was a bundle, wrapped in blue plastic and clothesline. When they were finished they stood, and wiped their hands on their thighs.

Despite Rai's assurances, I didn't expect the helicopter to come that day. I expected mistakes, inefficiency, incompetence, more phone calls—all of that. I expected to be there for the night.

But the helicopter came. We heard it first, to the south, in the distance, and only then did we see it—a tiny speck in the high center, following the river. Rai stood, and began waving. As it approached, all I felt was relief—it was here after all, and soon all of this, these brutal last few days, would be behind me. The helicopter seemed as slow as a swimmer, and seemed to approach forever, as we stood and watched.

Just then the pilot must have seen us, because he abruptly changed course, curving in a wide downward arc toward where we stood. It was a small machine, light, with a round Plexiglas bubble canopy. It was not General Said's piece of industrial equipment. It looked frail, delicate, and it came to a hover thirty feet or so above the river like a dragonfly. I could see the pilot clearly through the glass. He wore civilian clothes—a white dress shirt, dark pants. He was unhelmeted. I could see his feet moving on the pedals, as the machine bobbed and swayed. Rai waved with both arms, pointing to the gravel bank, and the pilot waved back, spun the helicopter effortlessly in the air, lowered it straight down to the ground, and settled, uneasily at first, onto
the gravel—one skid, then the other. He shut off the engine, and it wound down, the rotors shining and skipping in the sun.

The pilot opened the door, then hopped out and walked toward us. He was very young—in his late twenties at most. Rai went out to meet him, and I followed.

They exchanged a few words, then switched to English. I looked at him carefully—his white shirt, his dark pants, his gold watch, aviator glasses dangling from a cord around his neck—and I guessed that he was a rich man's son, playing at boldness.

Rai made the introductions, and the man looked me over quickly before obviously and rapidly losing interest. He cheered up dramatically, however, when he saw Elise—he took her hand, and smiled with lots of white teeth, and ran his hand easily through his well-cut hair.

“How do you like our beautiful country?” he said to her.

She looked at him, removed her hand, and did not reply.

Rai said something, and the man's smile skipped a beat, and he looked over at the bundle on the riverbank, then back.

Though we stood out in the sun it was far too cold for a well-tailored dress shirt. The man glanced at us, and our gear.

“Only three can come,” he said, not smiling anymore.

It was a small helicopter. I turned to Rai.

“Did you know about this?”

“They only have these. The Lamas. They have no big ones.”

“I am cold,” the pilot said. “Get your things. I will wait in the chopper.” He turned, and walked away, then got in and closed the door, as Rai looked on with undisguised contempt.

“So,” I said. “We'll have to leave the soldier and the boy. Is that right?”

“He knows the way,” Rai said, gesturing to the soldier. “And I will give them provisions.”

So that was it. Rai and the soldier dragged Ali over the
rocks to the helicopter, and laid him down along one of the skids. Then the pilot jumped out again with a length of chain, and padlocks, which he handed to them before getting in the helicopter again. We watched as they lashed Ali tightly to the skids with the chain, then with green canvas straps that the pilot tossed out the door to them. He was directing them through the window, but made no effort to help. When they were done, the pilot emerged once more, and bent down with visible distaste to heave on the bundle, assuring himself that it was tight enough, and would not fall, that none of the lashings would come loose and whip about in flight. He was shivering by then.

“Okay,” he said to us, opening the door on the canopy. “Your packs.”

He put them in the back himself, lifting them, clearly estimating their weight. He turned to me.

“Do you have a credit card?” he said. I fumbled for my wallet, pulled out the card, and handed it to him.

“Your passport also, please,” he said.

“Why do you need my passport?”

“So that I know you will pay,” he replied.

I gave it to him without a word.

“I do not like body recoveries,” he said. “All the time it is like this in the climbing season. And sometimes the climbers, they have no money. They do not want to pay.”

“We're not climbers,” I said.

He shrugged, then turned back to the business at hand.

“How much do you weigh?” he asked me. I told him.

“And you?” he turned to Elise again.

“Forty-five kilos,” she said. “Less now, I think.”

He looked at Rai, who said something, and he nodded, doing the figures in his head.

“No problem,” he said. “Let's go.”

The soldier and the boy stood a few feet away. The boy looked disconsolate. Their packs lay at their feet.

Rai turned to the soldier, and said a few words. The soldier replied, and then, somewhat to my surprise, Rai reached into his pack and quickly counted out a sheaf of bills, which he handed to him.

The helicopter was no larger than a small sedan, and it smelled like a new car. Rai sat up front, and Elise and I were pressed together with our gear in the back. The pilot slammed the doors, tugged on the handles, then trotted around to his seat, put on his seat belt, and began flipping switches. He pressed a button, and the engine came to life, driving the soldier and the boy a few yards back. The din was higher pitched than the Mi-17, a more female shriek, but deafening all the same, and we had no earphones. With a glance over his shoulder, and no ceremony at all, the pilot lifted off, scattering the gravel with the rotor wash, and then we were away, over the river, out into the center of the valley, the two figures shrinking rapidly in the distance. They looked up at us, and I looked down at them, until they were specks, until there was nothing left of them at all—just two dots, at a bend in the river, invisible, had I not known precisely where they stood. To the north, a sea of empty country, full of peaks and snow and valleys, glimpsed in the gaps of the ridges. Meanwhile, inches away, Ali lay fluttering and shivering like a flag. Soon it was hot in the bubble, with Elise pressed tight against me. I thought—life on one side, death on the other, and how strange it all is, how utterly dumbfounding and mysterious.

The light sparkled in the globe of the canopy, and caught the grains of dust, and soon we left the course of the river, crossing slot canyon after slot canyon, the ridges rising and falling beneath the skids, with only the occasional streams sparkling below us. A dry land, a labyrinth below us, without landmarks
to guide us. How casually the pilot flew, the tips of his fingers delicate on the stick, his eyes up, on the horizon, glancing down every so often at the instruments. He was following a compass heading, and had no use for the maze of shadows beneath us, as the machine swelled and sighed in the cold gusts above the ridge tops. Lower and lower, as Ali shook on. But Rai had tied him well, and none of the lashings came loose.

Rai saw something then, because his head turned and he looked down, and then he reached out and touched the pilot's arm, shouting above the engine, and pointing.

We were over a dry valley, studded with tiny bushes. From the air, the bushes looked black against the gray and brown earth. At first I didn't see what Rai was pointing at, and I leaned forward, against his seat, following his outstretched finger to the ground.

It was a rough line of them, walking together. They were to one side of us, ahead of us, and as I watched we rapidly gained on them, until they were abreast, and I could see them clearly, a few hundred feet away and several hundred feet below. They had stopped, and turned, and they were also pointing.

Rai shouted once more at the pilot. The pilot glanced over, and though it hardly seemed as if he moved the controls at all, the helicopter rolled steeply, pressing me against my seat, and then we were descending, my stomach rising into my chest. They came up fast, their faces lifted, and the pilot eased the stick back. The nose nodded up, the airspeed fell to nothing, and then he brought us to a hover thirty feet above the ground, almost directly over them. They scattered, hands above their heads, but then he backed away, like a horseman, light and easy in the saddle.

Perhaps there were thirty of them—men and women and children, all staring up at us with astonishment through the
dust from the rotor wash. They were dressed like villagers. Many wore blankets on their shoulders, and they were carrying loads—rough burlap sacks, with coils of twine. But they were thin, so thin they startled me—their gaunt, drawn faces, their eyes open, their mouths agape, looking up. There were animals, also—a skeletal handful of goats tied to leads, the points of their shoulders like pins, their hides drum-tight across their ribs. I imagined they were all that were left, that one by one the others had been consumed, as the weeks passed. But they were nearly out of the mountains. They had only a few more days of walking left.

“Who are they?” I shouted at Rai.

“I don't know,” he shouted back, over his shoulder.

For a few long seconds we stared at them, and they at us. I felt a terrible urge to laugh. They'd walked right by us, I thought. They never even knew we were there. But then the pilot tapped Rai on the shoulder, pointing to his gauges, and suddenly we were turning in the air, gathering speed, climbing away, and Ali resumed his eager rattle once again.

Twenty minutes later we were in the city.