Exiles (14 page)

“You’re a fascist,” he mumbled. “A devious, manipulative Austrian brownshirt.”

Franz wagged an admonishing finger at him as the cat jumped from the desk to the windowsill and slipped out.

|   |   |

“Mike’s Breakfast,” said Peter. “On me.”

Alex looked at Devi uneasily. “This can’t be good,” she said.
She got her coat, keeping a watchful eye on her father, and the three of them headed out.

Mike’s had been started by a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s who’d liked the freewheeling hash-head haven that was Kathmandu in those days. His restaurant was still a gathering place for homesick, hungry Westerners who craved something besides rice and lentils for breakfast. Peter and the girls took a
tempo
across town and sat at a table in the garden. Devi had never been there.

“Waffles with scrambled eggs and orange juice,” said Alex, when they’d been seated.

“Pancakes,” said Devi. She looked at Alex, a little unsure of herself. “With butter and maple syrup and hash browns. Okay?”

“The diabetes express,” said Alex. “Go for it.”

“Coffee here,” Peter said. “And, mmm … everything everyone else is having.”

When the waitress left, Alex turned anxiously to her father. “Let’s hear it.”

Peter explained the situation, and soon she looked as if she were going to burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll have a jeep, so you can borrow it once in a while.”

The girls looked at each other. Devi put her hands on the table. “I want to come too,” she said.

It was the most openly assertive Peter had seen her. “Don’t your parents need you?”

“I think they’re tired of having me around.”

“She’s practically been living with us, anyway,” Alex said.

“Still, you’d have to ask them,” he said.

“I will, but they won’t mind.”

Peter rested his chin in his hands. He should have anticipated this, and he hadn’t. “What about school?”

“I can do homeschool, like Alex.”

“Franz says it’s barely an apartment—really just a big room.”

“We’ll pretend we’re in New York,” Alex said. Peter did his best to sound reasonable. “What I mean is, you won’t have any privacy.”

Devi rolled her eyes. “I grew up in a family where having your own room means hanging a blanket,” she said. “I’m not
used
to privacy. Too much privacy is what makes Westerners sick in the head.”

The conversation was a stark reminder that new alliances had complicated Peter’s authority. Of course, he could lay down the law like a bully and endure weeks of sulking while he and his daughter lived like caged rats in an ugly experiment, courtesy of a vengeful panderer. Beyond that, though, they’d be treating Tibetans without a Tibetan translator, which would only worsen the nightmare.

It hadn’t occurred to him, but for that reason alone it would probably be better to have Devi there than not. Add in Alex’s happiness and the effect it would have on him, and matters quickly distilled themselves into clarity. Some defeats turned out not to be defeats at all.

The girls picked at their food in silence, looking tense and unhappy.

Peter did his best to suppress a canny grin. “You’ll both have to work in the clinic every day, then,” he said. “You’ll do your schoolwork in the evenings. Absolutely no malingering.”

“Ha!” said Alex, grinning. She high-fived Devi. “Ha!”

And Peter thought,
“Ha” is right, kid
.

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Peter awakened on their first morning in the new place and lay there, disoriented, thinking he had to go feed Wayne Lee. But Devi’s parents had moved into the house to care for the goat while he and the girls were gone. It turned out that Sangita and Sonam had been living in a wall tent set up in the courtyard of an apartment building, which was why Devi never wanted to take Alex home with her. It was also why Sonam hadn’t been able to get over his respiratory problems.

The Jorpati apartment adjoined the house of a Nepali Brahmin family; ten years previously it had been a cowshed. The family had
hired workers to plaster the walls and pour a concrete floor over the dirt. They apparently hadn’t bothered with rebar, and the floor was full of cracks that still emitted a vague odor of manure. It was about fourteen by twenty, not a closet but close enough with three people crammed into it. Peter had a cot in the corner near the window; on the opposite side of the room, behind a curtain, Alex and Devi shared a small double mattress on a platform made of pallets.

Devi was snoring softly, but Alex was in the first stages of her early-morning rustling. She’d be up soon. The walls were damp with all their breath. Suitcases, backpacks, the heater they’d brought, and various cardboard boxes containing food and household goods were spread out across the floor. To the left of the door was the kitchen, which consisted of a sink, a tiny fridge, a two-burner propane hot plate, three pans, and a teakettle. The bathroom was an outhouse in the owners’ backyard.

Peter heard noises from outside, so he hauled himself up and pushed the curtain aside. There was a water tap just below the window, and a long line of women stood in the morning chill, waiting to fill plastic jugs from the trickle that flowed out of the spigot. Fortunately he and the girls had their own supply inside, and he’d bought a filter.

He lay down again, his hands behind his head, which was propped up on a cheap, lumpy pillow. He stared at the ceiling, laced with a complex pattern of cracks like the scratched hide of an old water buffalo. The walls of the room had been painted, but the ceiling had been left the dull bone white of rough plaster.

So much for canny victory.
I am an utter failure
, Peter thought. It wasn’t a particularly dramatic revelation, just a dry, unpleasant truth, like the bitter taste that lingers in the mouth the morning after too rowdy a night. He had failed at marriage, failed at fatherhood, failed even in his battle with Bahadur. He had been too trusting; he had underestimated multiple threats; he had failed to work hard enough. He was forty-four. His old classmates had successful practices and beautiful wives and brilliant children and elegant homes in lush suburbs, and he was lying on a hard mattress
on the floor of an old cowshed while women in
lungis
drew dirty water from a rusty tap five feet from his head. He had chronic diarrhea; he was afraid of getting TB; he was afraid of Alex getting TB—in fact, increasingly he was just afraid in general.

Alex mumbled in her half sleep, and outside one of the women suddenly laughed boisterously. Peter wondered at the happiness of the Nepalis, people who owned nothing but a few clothes, a cooking pot, a jug for the neighborhood water tap. They lived short, uncomfortable lives beset with pestilence, shared with parasites and mangy dogs, and still they laughed more than anyone laughed in Berkeley.

As for him, he dreaded the new clinic, dreaded the day itself. He didn’t even want to leave his bed. He remembered, briefly, the radiance at Lama Padma’s, the singular light that seemed to hold secrets, and the feeling of being physically carried outside of the room and into the sky. What
was
that, anyway? Lama Padma had grinned at him as if he knew exactly what was going on. To Peter it was unlike anything he’d ever felt, and at the same time the experience seemed familiar, as close to real happiness and freedom as he could imagine. But as far as he knew he might never see Lama Padma again, and he had no idea how to regain that state himself. For that matter, this business of karma purification was even worse than Mina had predicted. It wasn’t just things hitting the fan; it was
he himself
hitting the fan and getting cut into thousands of pieces that blew outward to the winds.

Alex stirred, groaned, and pulled back the curtain. She scowled out into the room with fright-wig hair. “Time?”

Peter felt for his watch, which was buried amid the wallet, keys, water bottle, and other stuff on the crate that served as his bedside table.

“Seven-thirty,” he said. “It’s late.”

She briefly surveyed the room, then lay back down and pulled the covers over her head. One arm snaked out and drew the curtain closed.

Peter didn’t want to get up, but he did. Alex and Devi would be
hungry. He dressed and put on his scuffed shoes. In the confusion of arrival the previous evening they hadn’t turned the heater up high enough, and the place was cold. He went over to it and rotated the dial, then went out to pee.

The outhouse was built of planks, with a tin roof, but between the chilly air and the ample ventilation, at least it didn’t stink. There was just a hole in the ground with a place on each side to put your feet if you needed to squat. When Peter had finished, he hung a roll of toilet paper on a nail and went back inside.

Alex pulled back her curtain again, as if she’d hoped the previous viewing had been a hallucination. “Good fucking God,” she said.

“You’re being punished for your father’s sins,” Peter said. “It’s very Greek.”

“I wouldn’t mind Greek if we were in Greece.”

Devi cried out, babbling something in Nepali, and Alex shook her and said her name. She rolled over and buried her face in Alex’s flank. Peter rooted through the food bag to see what he could cook. The heater was ticking, but so far it wasn’t helping much.

Alex lifted Devi’s arm off her, then pulled on a sweater and a jacket. She grabbed her pants from the foot of the bed and put them on under the covers. She got up, slipped on her socks and shoes, then headed outside.

“Fuck!” echoed in from the outhouse in back, and Peter briefly wondered if the Nepali family had heard it too. He decided he didn’t care and got water heating for oatmeal. Devi stirred again and mumbled. Soon Alex returned, her teeth chattering.

“This country is a real confidence builder,” she said, hopping up and down near the heater to try to get warm. “Just when I think I’m starting to get it, it turns out I don’t know shit.”

“You’ll be intimately acquainted with shit by the time we leave
here
,” he said. “What happened?”

“I’m trying to squat over the thing, but it’s so cold I can’t even relax enough to go,” she said. “And then I missed the hole, and I’m
thinking, they’re going to find me out here frozen to the ground by a pee icicle.”

Devi rolled over sleepily and sat up. She rubbed her eyes and looked around. “Hey, not
bad
,” she exclaimed, smiling. “We’ve even got our own water!”

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An hour later they met Ian at the clinic for the official passing of the baton. He was a good-looking, affable Kiwi of about thirty who’d finished his residency the previous year and had signed on with Phwoof so he could get in some mountaineering before starting a full-time practice back home in New Zealand.

The Nepali nurse—a short, broad, fierce-looking woman named Banhi—busied herself with some paperwork as Ian walked them through the clinic, which took up two rooms on the bottom floor of a concrete building. One was an office and exam room; the other served as the triage and waiting room. Both had windows to the street made of old-fashioned opaque security glass with wire mesh cast inside it. It was chilly.

“Looking forward to going home?” Peter asked.

“Can’t begin to tell you.”

“What’s Wellington like?” Alex asked. She’d been watching Ian quite closely.

“Splendid,” he said. “It’s all built on hills around the most beautiful harbor. If you’re up there in the evening, with the sun going down over Cook Strait and the city lights coming on … It’s just …” He looked about ready to weep at the prospect of seeing it again.

“It sounds wonderful,” Alex said. She had acquired a kind of glow. “I’d love to see it someday.”

Peter and Devi both stared at her, then glanced at each other, then looked back at her.
Holy shit
, Peter thought. He’d seen her flirt before, but this time she was doing it right in front of Devi. He hoped there wasn’t about to be some sort of blowup.

Ian seemed to notice too. “Of course,” he stammered. “I mean, you’re always welcome to come visit if you … um, you know …”

“Turn eighteen,” Peter offered, helpfully.

Alex shot him a look, then smiled at Ian. “Thank you,” she said. “I might. Visit, I mean.
And
turn eighteen.”

Ian handed Peter the keys, wished them luck, and started off down the street. His step was so buoyant he looked as if he might break into spontaneous, ecstatic dance, twirling from the light poles like Gene Kelly in
Singin’ in the Rain
.

Devi turned to Alex and crossed her arms over her chest. “My,
my
,” she said.

Alex blushed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You are such a hussy!”

“I know,” Alex said, “and I really, really apologize. But you have to admit …”

“Well, he
was
pretty gorgeous,” said Devi. She uncrossed her arms, then Alex hugged her and mumbled something in her ear. Devi smiled, then laughed.

They strolled through the clinic again and took stock. The waiting room had one old poster taped onto the concrete wall—the usual kitten hanging by its front claws from the usual branch, with the usual “Hang in there, baby!” printed over the top—but with translations written freehand underneath in both Nepali and Tibetan. The tape was old and yellow, and the poster had started to peel off the wall.

A dozen or so blue metal folding chairs with white paint spattered on them were arrayed haphazardly around the room, and in the center stood a low wooden table that looked as if it had fallen off a truck and broken into pieces, then been reconstructed by a four-year-old using chewing gum and vomit. It held a tattered copy of
Newsweek Asia
, a slightly more recent Bollywood magazine, and a thick wad of Kleenex that was suspiciously yellow in the center. Peter kicked it onto the floor, then kicked it again, to the side of the room. When Devi went to pick it up he told her not to touch it, and he was serious.

In the office–exam room–lab there were a few boxes of latex gloves, assorted syringes, an old mercury thermometer in an alcohol container, cotton swabs, a handful of surgical masks, and a pressure cooker on a hot plate that apparently served as an autoclave.