Right of Thirst (6 page)

Early the next morning the men appeared. Eight or nine of them. They were bearded, dressed in a strange mixture of cheap Western clothes—worn and blackened tennis shoes, T-shirts—and traditional local cloaks. They wore tight woolen caps, which they touched in deference to Captain Rai. They hardly spoke. They were filthy. They did not resemble Rai, who was from the lowlands. Their skin was paler, with a distinct Asian cast to their features. Some of them had light eyes. They smelled strongly of smoke and a little bit like animals. As individuals they were young, but as a group they looked a thousand years old.

Rai looked at them and sighed. “I need some soldiers,” he said, and led them out from the shadows of the camp into the sun on the field, where the tents lay waiting, mildewed and cracked and unfolded for years.

It was cold, especially in the shade, and the wind was picking up and flowing down off the peaks. Everyone's breath was visible. Elise and I retreated to the dining tent for another cup of tea. There was nowhere else to go, and nothing to do but sit there, reading and talking, standing up every so often to stretch. We left the door open, pulled our chairs close to the heater, and watched them.

“We should help,” I said. “Don't you think?”

“I don't know,” she said.

They seemed to be learning quickly; after only a few minutes of instruction the first tent was being staked into the ground, and Rai was simply standing and pointing. Every so often he'd stamp his feet and walk in a little circle to keep warm. The villagers, though, seemed utterly untouched by the cold, pounding in the metal pegs with stones in their bare hands.

After a few minutes, when the second tent was up and Rai had run his gloved hands across the ropes again to make sure they were tight, it was apparent that he'd had enough. He turned and walked toward us, in his green army jacket, the sun reflecting off his mirrored sunglasses, until he crossed into the shadows again. He stamped into the dining tent, and made straight for the kerosene heater, which was already up and hissing.

“It is very cold,” he said. “And time for breakfast.”

“It doesn't seem to bother them,” I replied.

“They are like that,” he said. “We have a brigade of them for mountain duty.”

The men had begun to speak. We could hear snatches of words and laughter—a local dialect that Rai told us he did not fully understand. But they kept on, the tents rising one after the other in a neat line. An hour passed, the band of sunlight slowly flowed across the dining tent, and soon we took off our jackets and turned the heater down.

For a while, despite the draft, Rai watched them through the open door as we had done. He took out his watch and timed them—ten minutes, give or take, for each tent. They were identical to the dining tent, designed to sleep perhaps a dozen soldiers, and tall enough to stand in. He took a bite of bread, a sip of tea. He dabbed his lips with his napkin. Then, apparently satisfied, he lit a cigarette, and closed the door.

“How are you paying them?” I asked. “By the tent or by the hour?”

He shot me a look.

“No money,” he said, after a pause, “but I will give them some kerosene.”

Elise made a soft dismissive sound.

“How much kerosene?” I was curious, mostly because of his reluctance to discuss it. This isn't your affair, he seemed to say. This is a local matter.

“We will see,” he said, finally. “Perhaps a few liters per man when the job is done.”

It wasn't hard labor, but it was work nonetheless. The villagers, I suddenly knew, had not been given a choice. Captain Rai had gone down to the village, and that was that.

Later, after we'd eaten breakfast, and the valley was fully lit by the sun, Elise stood up and announced that she was going to take a shower. I wanted one as well; already nearly a week had passed, the walls of the dining tent felt close and warm, my hair was sticky, and my underwear needed to be washed. Not entirely unpleasant, not yet, but I wanted to be clean again. The villagers, the men in the field, looked as if they had not bathed ever in their lives and it was easy to understand why: the river was all snowmelt, only a degree or two above freezing.

Elise had come prepared; she had a black neoprene bag with a nozzle that held ten gallons of water, with a collapsible aluminum tripod to hang it from. The whole apparatus was light and modern-looking, with a digital thermometer woven neatly into the bag: it was, it seemed, her single personal luxury. I'd noticed her unpacking it outside her tent several days before and asked what it was. Filled with water, the bag was heavy, and I offered to help her carry it out into the sun to warm.

“It is only a little way,” she said, gesturing toward a few
boulders that stood lit up in the sun. “I will sit on the rocks.”

The boulders were only a few meters from the tents, and all who cared to look would have a full view of her, back turned or not. Rai glanced at her, but said nothing.

“Elise,” I said, “come with me for a moment.”

She followed me out the door into the cold. I kept walking into the sun, and the sounds of the workers—stones on metal pegs, the rattle of canvas, and murmuring voices—came to us clearly. When we were out of earshot from the tent, I turned to her.

“Elise,” I said, “I know you don't want to be told what to do, but you can't undress and take a shower in front of these men. Don't you understand that?”

She looked at me with her startling blue eyes, in her red hat, and suddenly she seemed terribly young to me, unused to the world as it is. Not naïve, exactly. But uncompromising.

“Dr. Anderson, you are not my father,” she said.

I sighed. “That's true, Elise,” I said. “I'm not your father. But this isn't a beach in Spain, either. It's asking for trouble. If you want to take a shower, do it where no one can see you.”

She pursed her lips, her forehead wrinkled a bit, and I could see her struggling between resenting my comments and acknowledging that perhaps there was some sense to them.

“You are right, maybe,” she said, finally.

In the end I helped her carry the bag several hundred yards to an alcove in the side of the valley, close to the base of the cliff and concealed from the camp. The earth beneath our feet was nearly the consistency of sand, and there were many small gray stones that sparkled in the sun. Some kind of mineral—mica, perhaps—was mixed within them. The alcove was sheltered on three sides from the wind. It was quiet, and almost warm. I was out of breath—the bag was ungainly to carry, with only one
handle, and we had held it awkwardly between us. After a few moments of rest, she set up the tripod, and we hung the bag high from its hook.

“How long does it take to heat up?” I asked

“Two hours,” she said. “But it can get too hot. Once I burned myself.”

She had softened toward me, apparently, because as we walked back toward the camp she said I could use it when she was done.

“Thank you,” I said. “That would be nice.”

A few hours later, after she had come back smiling and clean and flushed, more cheerful, it seemed, than she had been in days, I took her up on the offer.

Standing in the alcove, it felt very odd to undress and stand naked in the hot sun and the cold air, stuffing my dirty clothes in the plastic bag I'd brought for the purpose. I crouched beneath the bag, under the tripod, in the cold circle of mud from Elise's shower, adjusted the nozzle, and let the hot water fall on my hair and back, lathering myself thoroughly with liquid soap that smelled of peppermint and tingled and mixed with the swirling gusts of wind that blew a sheen of dust against my legs. I let all the water run out, until the bag above me lightened and began to flap against the poles, and my wet hair squeaked between my fingers. Then, quickly, before I got cold again, I stepped out onto the dry ground, toweled myself dry, and dressed in clean clothes. Walking back toward the camp, I felt as though I was beginning to wake up at last.

I asked Captain Rai to direct me to the pallet of medical supplies. Earlier he had deflected me—let us wait until the tents are up before we open the tarps—but the tents would not be ready for days. He sighed and reached for the manifest on the table before him.

“There is no hurry, Doctor,” he said. “There is plenty of time.”

“It's hard to sit around doing nothing,” I replied. “I'd like to get started.”

It was too cold to rain, and the pile of provisions and equipment had been left out in the open, dropped in slings by the Russian pilots conveniently close to the dining tent. The pallets themselves all looked alike, and were numbered—twelve heavy burlap bags, wrapped tight in blue plastic sheeting and strapped to a crude platform of soft yellow wood.

Rai paced around the pile, consulting his manifest, before he found it. The pallet weighed at least a thousand pounds, and I stared at it helplessly for a few moments.

“We'll need to set up a tent for the clinic,” I said, finally. “Then we can see what we have.”

“Okay,” he said, and began walking purposefully out toward the line of tents in the field, where the village men had gathered once again.

Rai returned with four men. They walked behind him, the heavy canvas tent rolled in a line on their shoulders. Rai himself carried nothing at all—not so much, I suspected, because of personal unwillingness, but rather for the message it might send. There are those who carry loads, and there are those who do not. I'd chosen a spot perhaps twenty-five yards from the dining tent.

“Is this where you would like it, Doctor?” he said, formally.

“Yes,” I replied. “Thank you.”

He nodded imperiously at the men, pointed to the ground, and they let the tent fall heavily off their shoulders onto the gravel. They kept their eyes on their feet, and worked silently as we stood and watched—there was none of the laughter that came across the field when Captain Rai was elsewhere. In a few minutes the tent was up.

The mildewed green canvas released yellow shadows on the ground. There was no floor. It was decades old, and would have leaked badly in any kind of rain. A heavy snowfall, too—I could see it sagging under the burden, dripping and giving way. But for the moment the weather was light. Wind the tent could bear, staked tightly as it was to the ground. The door closed with buttons, the poles were dark brown wood.

It was the first day of clarifying work, carrying the frozen bags of IV fluid, the boxes of needles and tubing, the donated samples of antibiotics and anesthetics, the scalpels and suture kits and white coils of gauze. Elise and I did it together—I declined Rai's offer of villagers, feeling a distinct sense of superiority as I did so. I was surprised by how I threw myself into the task, bending and lifting, breathing hard. And my eagerness made me realize that I truly had come for a reason, that the simple freedom of experience was not what I sought. I needed something else, something clear and redeeming and larger than
myself, whatever it might be, and in that moment I knew it.

By the afternoon, the tent was stocked; there were even cots for imaginary patients, and IV stands, an examination table, and chairs. A lantern, and another kerosene heater. The wind rattled the sides. I thanked Elise for her help, looking at my empty ward.

“It is nice to do something,” she said. “I would like to start my research, but I can do nothing now.”

I lit the second kerosene heater to make sure it worked, and sat beside it on an aluminum folding chair for a good while, listening to it hiss, warming my cold hands and knees. She sat beside me, and did the same. I was sore from all the bending and lifting, and breathless from the altitude.

“Are you married, Dr. Anderson?” she asked.

I turned to look at her.

“Please call me Charles,” I said. “I was married. My wife died a few months ago.”

It was still something I was not accustomed to saying.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “That is terrible.”

“Thank you.”

She paused, but then her curiosity got the best of her.

“Why do you wear your wedding ring?”

“Because it's comforting,” I said, after a moment. I had not been asked that question before.

She nodded, as if my answer was a practical one.

“Do you have children?”

“I have a son. He's only a few years younger than you.”

“Is he a doctor also?”

“He's an actor. At least, he's trying to be an actor.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is difficult, I think.”

“Not many can support themselves doing it.”

“Do you give him money?”

“I do help him, yes,” I said, surprised again by her bluntness.
Her questions felt like muffled blows.

“Do you think he will succeed?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I hope that he will.”

I wondered what he was doing at that moment, and realized that for him it was very late at night, and that he must be sleeping.

At his college graduation, as I'd stood with Rachel in the crowd, and he crossed the stage to receive his diploma and his drama award, so young and far away, I could hardly bear to look at him. I did not expect it, but I'd been nearly overcome as we stood with the other parents in the audience, watching our children go, and it was a struggle not to give too much away when his drama teacher—an intense, bone-thin woman with severe gray hair—took me aside at the reception afterward and told me point-blank not to make it difficult for him because he genuinely had a chance. I'm sure she had no idea that her words were precious to me.

I'd seen him onstage a year earlier, howling and screaming in an experimental production written by one of his friends, to which, despite his resistance, I'd invited myself during a quick visit for a conference in the city. The play, at least in my eyes, was not good at all. Eric was the lead. I both pitied and admired him for struggling and storming as he did. It was something I could never have brought myself to do, yet he yelled and swore and flung himself all over the stage. Afterward, there was far too much applause in the small theater full of friends and acquaintances, and too many congratulatory remarks, and a bouquet of roses, and then the playwright himself crept with tentative arrogance out onto the stage for the question-and-answer session. The playwright blinked in the lights. He seemed both painfully young and painfully sincere, and it was hard to reconcile the torrent of brutal language in the script with the boyish author
on the stage. My heart both sank and went out to all of them, as I stood and clapped for their bows with the rest. Oh, Eric, I thought. You've got a long road ahead of you.

He'd been drawn to acting in high school. We didn't talk much about it, but that night, over dinner in an expensive restaurant overlooking the lights of the city, I did ask him why he was so compelled by it, why he kept trying while one by one his peers drifted away into the professions.

He replied that there had been a few times, during one performance or another, when he lost himself, when he felt as if he were no longer fully conscious. It was as if he were somewhere else, in the lights, the presence of the audience in the shadows, like standing next to the sea at night—he couldn't even remember the passage of the lines through his mouth. It felt athletic, somehow, or meditative, as if he had stepped beyond himself entirely—he said he couldn't really describe it well, only that it was powerful and strange, and nothing else he'd ever done was like it. He understood why many felt that acting was a self-absorbed pursuit, with little practical use, but those moments made him think otherwise. Somewhere below all the pretense and falsity there was something selfless and profound. In this way, his teacher claimed, acting was a kind of metaphor for our lives. We all assume roles in the everyday world, and though the roles may vary, and though we may be unaware of them in our conscious minds, we endlessly fall into character nonetheless, and let them sustain us, and carry us along. He repeated his teacher's words to me with the sincerity of youth, and as I listened to him it struck me that perhaps his teacher was a more interesting woman than I had thought, one who examined her choices rather than just making them, but also one who undoubtedly sought to impose significance where none, or not so
much, existed. It was only acting class, I thought, full of kids who dreamed of being movie stars. It was hardly a metaphor for life. But he meant what he said, and I could see it, and so I was careful to keep my comments as mild as I could.

“Well,” I'd said, “if that's true, then how do we tell which role is real? Doesn't that mean that everything is just a kind of game?”

“But that's exactly what we do,” he said, looking intensely at me. “We're just not aware of it. We construct our own identities all the time, and our identities always change depending on circumstances. There's no such thing as one identity, really, when you think about it. Acting makes you realize that. You can be anything. It's liberating.”

He took a swallow of wine.

“You know,” he said. “I can feel it. I really can. I'm feel like I'm just one phone call away, and the phone's going to ring, and that will be it.”

“It's never one phone call, Eric. For anything. That only happens in the movies.”

“You know what I mean. I'm as good as a lot of people. There is no reason why it shouldn't be me. I've had encouragement here, too. It's not just my teacher.”

“You're better than a lot of people,” I said.

He smiled then, his face lighting up. He resembled Rachel in some ways—the same coloring and gestures, the same physical ease within himself. But he had none of her restraint, none of her wry watchfulness. He was the opposite of that, another pole of the magnet entirely, and if he had news, I knew it at a glance. He smelled of cigarette smoke, and a single black coil of the tattoo he'd gotten a few months earlier was just visible below the cuff of his shirt at his wrist, and his earring, a dull
pewter stud, gleamed a little in the soft lighting, but for an instant, with his dark curly hair and his green eyes, he looked like a boy again anyway. I knew that he was a little spoiled, that he assumed good things would come to him because they always had, and we had given him a bit too much over the years—a new car in high school, trips with his friends, generous sums for clothes and music and all the rest. And though his intelligence was plain, he had little tolerance for work that did not interest him, and his grades in high school had not been good enough for a first-rate college. My own had always been more than good enough, and yet I'd gone to a state university on a scholarship, and part of me resented him for squandering the opportunities I had not been given. But I was also proud to give them, even as I envied him the freedom that he felt was his. With his privilege came something else, something I'd lacked at the same age: he was kinder than I had been, even-handed and generous to his friends, with hardly an ill word toward anyone. I envied him that as well.

In what he'd chosen, though, he was as driven and as disciplined as I ever could have wanted, and that was where I saw myself in him. My handsome, good-hearted son—who was I to deny the possibilities, which perhaps were not impossible, not entirely out of reach?

“Have you been in touch with your teacher?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I talk to her every couple of weeks. She's really optimistic for me. She really believes it will happen.”

“Tell me,” I said, after a moment. “How do you feel when you audition for a part you really want, and you don't get it?”

“Disappointed,” he replied. “Of course. Sometimes I'm crushed.”

“Which role are you playing then?”

“The role of the waiter,” he said, and we both laughed, and
I wondered how much Rachel's illness had prompted him to seek solace with that woman, who believed in him and encouraged him, so nearly his mother's age, offering what passed for answers. He was so young, I thought, and so confident, and so full of passionate ideas that would not endure the test of experience. But on that night especially I didn't want to be the voice of caution.

When I finally told him that he was the best thing in the play, that I thought he'd been terrific, he smiled uneasily and confessed that he was embarrassed by the script, and that had in fact been the reason he'd agreed to the role. His teacher had said that in order to develop as an actor he must be willing to immerse himself even in work he was uncomfortable with, and that my presence in the audience had been a still greater test. He must learn to become a chameleon, and lose himself no matter who was watching, and only later indulge in the luxury of choice, and he was trying to follow her advice.

I'd been relieved a little by his words. But it also occurred to me that the world is not so pure, and does not respect or appreciate such trips to the monastery, and what would serve him most of all would be to choose works that would put him in the best possible light at every opportunity. But I said nothing about that, and only raised my glass of wine and touched it to his.

I knew that the trip had surprised and troubled him. When I had called him, and told him of my plans, I could hear it in his silences. He wanted to know how long I would be gone, and when I would return, and though I think by then he understood that I was suffering more than he had realized, to see such evidence of it did little to comfort him. Instead, it disturbed him further, as if the constancy of both my presence and my restraint had sustained him more than he knew.

A few days before I left, a package arrived at my door. It was
from Eric, and when I opened it, I saw that it was a gift—a beautifully made, expensive utility tool, stainless steel, full of blades and pliers and tweezers. I imagined him wandering through a sporting goods store, wondering what to buy.

He sent a note, also, neither addressed nor signed.
Please be careful
, it read. Nothing more.