Exiles (4 page)

The U.S. embassy clinic was fully staffed. Subsequent calls revealed that none of the hospitals in town had the funds to hire a cardiologist, even at the pittance they paid. One doc he spoke to directed him to CIWEC, the international clinic that catered to a mix of poor Nepalis and visiting Westerners. It wasn’t far, so he left and walked over, but they were full up too. The nurse, a red-haired Australian in her thirties, suggested he check out something that sounded like Phwoof.

“I’m sorry?” Peter said, thinking she’d coughed or used some sort of Aussie slang.

She smiled. “Physicians without Frontiers. Phwoof, we call it. They’ve got a clinic down the hill. One of their docs pissed off home last month, so they might be worth a go.”

He decided to clean up and try again after lunch.

|   |   |

Alex put her face in her hands. “Jesus, Dad.”

He sat on the couch beside her. “Look, it’s cheap enough that we can live here awhile if we want to.”

“I thought you let Mom take all the money.”

“
Almost
all of it.”

She slumped back, fighting tears. He put a hand on her knee.

“We’ll find a way to make it work,” he said.

She turned to him, her eyes fierce.
“Why?”
she said. “What’s so compelling about this place? The house is freezing, there’s cow shit everywhere, and so far every meal consists of lentils and rice.”

She stormed upstairs and slammed her door. Peter was about to go after her, but Sangita was in the kitchen, leaning quietly against the counter by the sink. He went in and apologized. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it about the food,” he said.

She shrugged and said,
“Ke garne?”
He’d soon be hearing a lot of this expression, which meant, basically, “What to do?”

“I know place, Western things buying,” she said. “We make menu. She be okay.”

“You don’t know her,” said Peter.

“I know someone great much like her.” She turned back to the stove, humming to herself, and stirred the pot.

“So what clinic were you talking about the night we arrived?” Peter asked. “And who’s Franz?”

Sangita looked at him over her shoulder and smiled.

|   |   |

“I heard about the little imbroglio at the teaching hospital,” Franz said, shaking Peter’s hand. “I had a feeling you were going to be available.” He ran the Phwoof clinic Peter was already planning to visit, as it turned out.

“Apparently everyone did but me,” Peter replied. “Is this a smaller town than it seems?”

Franz turned on the coffee. “It’s like anywhere,” he said. “You become acquainted with one or two of the right people and you can find out most of what you need to know.”

“Such as where I live, apparently.”

“Oh, all kinds of things,” Franz said, and smiled.

Franz was a thickset Austrian in his fifties with short white hair surrounding a shiny bald pate. His English was nearly flawless. He had a bull neck and a strong jaw, his face softened only by a slight middle-aged dewlap and by his small, octagonal rimless glasses. He wore a blue canvas shirt with old, wrinkled khakis and brown Rockports. His arms and hands were thick and sinewed, but for all his obvious physical strength he seemed imbued with an air of reticence or regret. When they’d shaken hands his grip was soft, the touch tentative and probing. Peter had seen this combination before.

“Orthopedic surgeon?” he ventured.

“And you’re a psychic, I guess. Not nearly enough of those in Nepal.” He seemed jovial, more or less, but with an edge worth noting.

Phwoof was in a modest two-story house on a side street about a half hour’s walk from Peter’s place. Franz’s office was painted bright yellow and had windows on three sides. Milk crates full of medical texts were stacked against the walls. The open window brought a warm breeze and the scent of flowers.

“Not a lot of American cardiologists come over here,” Franz said. “Forgive me for being blunt, but any malpractice issues I should know about?”

“All my patients die,” Peter said. “Eventually.”

Franz chuckled. When the coffee was ready, he poured them each a cup. The men sat in the office’s squeaky, tattered chairs.

“Thanks for sending Sangita,” said Peter, “even though it was a little creepy to find her there.”

“It’s politically incorrect to say this, but you may as well know: Sangita is industrious and she doesn’t steal, which sets her apart from most
didis
. She’s Tibetan, even though she wears a
bindi
and pretends to be Nepali.”

“Why would she pretend?”

“She’ll tell you if she wants to,” Franz said. It was a subtle but distinctly anti-imperialist remark, Peter thought, respectful of Sangita’s privacy and informative of Peter’s place in the pecking order, just in case this was required. “And by the way, don’t expect subservience. She’ll give you an honest day’s work, but she won’t kowtow.”

“I’m figuring that out,” Peter said. “It’s a relief.”

Franz nodded approvingly, sipped his coffee, and fixed Peter with an oddly penetrating gaze. “We generally get three kinds here: missionaries, misfits, and malcontents,” he said. “Mind my asking which one you are?”

“Jesus, this really
is
a job interview, isn’t it? Suppose I ask why there’s an opening on the staff?”

Franz shrugged. “We often need doctors because I don’t mind firing them,” he said. “We had a Belgian in here last month who was so afraid of catching something that he’d barely touch the patients.”
Franz raised his hand and brought it down on the desk like a hatchet onto a block.

“Well,” said Peter, “I’m definitely not a missionary.”

“Good,” Franz said. “Misfits and malcontents I can work with. You’ll get the salary of a fry cook and an education in a variety of compelling and terrifying diseases you’d rarely cross paths with at home. What do you think?”

As much as Peter disliked being cornered, the alternative was giving up and catching a plane home. “What do you get out of it?” he asked.

“A chance to keep the place open,” Franz said. Phwoof clinics, it seemed, were sponsored by a loose-knit consortium involving the WHO and a couple of international NGOs. Most of the money had lately been redirected to Darfur, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Nepali government had stepped in, but they would commit for only a year.

“Six months from now, if they decide they don’t like us, that’s it,” Franz said. “I’ll go back home and eat
kaisersemmel
and sausage, I guess.”

“Are you sure a cardiologist is the best choice?”

“Our patients walk everywhere, eat too little, and die young of something else,” he said. “But there
are
some heart problems I’m not used to seeing. You might understand something about them; if so, I’d like to know.”

Peter told him what he knew: that Nepalis and Indians were four times more likely to have coronary artery disease and heart attacks than Caucasians, that half the attacks happened before age fifty and a quarter before age forty.

“Do you know why?” Franz asked.

“Something to do with how lipoprotein is processed,” Peter said. “When they get prosperous they get away from traditional dietary fats, and that’s when the trouble starts.”

Franz rubbed his forehead. “Big Indian community where you live?”

“We wouldn’t have enough engineers without them.”

“I didn’t know about any of what you just said, but it wouldn’t look bad in a grant proposal. If we actually did something for the prosperous once in a while, it might help us.”

“So what am I going to be dealing with?”

“I mainly treat TB, conjunctivitis, dysentery, miscellaneous infections, and bullet wounds,” Franz said. “Tapeworms and flukes and protozoa. Occasionally there’s a mountaineer with a compound fracture, thank God. It keeps my hand in.”

“Bullet wounds?”

Franz regarded him, surprised. “You should read the papers, Yank,” he said. “You’ve enlisted for service in a civil war.”

Peter shifted in his seat. “I thought the whole Maoist thing was mainly out in the countryside,” he said.

Franz replied simply, “It
was.
”

|   |   |

“So we’re staying,” Alex said. She sounded almost relieved, but not quite.

“If you’re miserable three months from now, we’ll negotiate.”

They walked over to the Bhat-bhateni Supermarket, which occupied five floors on a half acre of land and was surrounded on the outside by stalls selling fresh fruits and vegetables. The building also contained a hair salon, a dry cleaner, a shop with bright ground spices in wooden bins, and a dozen other stores. Alex’s face lit up, taking it all in. She stopped dead in the street and was immediately nudged from behind by a goat on a leash. Its owner spoke to it, then gently led it around her.

Inside, they each took a cart. Peter picked out electric heaters for the bedrooms and a big kerosene beast for downstairs. Alex found Rice Krispies, which made her nearly ecstatic. She bought toilet paper, tampons, milk, rice milk, yogurt, Wheat Chex, and Toasties. He bought eggs, flour, chicken, steak, hamburger, lettuce, cabbage, beans, chocolate-chip cookies in a giant paper bag, charcoal and lighter fluid, and, just for good measure, a purple Frisbee.
On another floor he found sheets, pillowcases, and down comforters.

When they arrived at the checkout line, Alex eyed her father’s cart. “I thought you hated to shop,” she said.

“I hate to shop in America. Here, they need us.”

“Oh, you’re a philanthropist now.”

A grin tugged at the corners of her mouth, but part of the game was giving as good as he got. He scowled. “I’m going to be glad in a few years, when you become pleasant,” he said.

She patted his stomach. “If you’re nice to me, you might live long enough to see it.”

On the way home, crammed into a cab with their plunder, he watched her as she looked dreamily out. When they were stuck in traffic and the huge, broad face of an ox suddenly appeared at her window, she jumped, startled, and then laughed.

“Hello, ox,” she said. “Are you as strong as yourself?” She giggled self-consciously at her own dumb joke, and Peter knew she’d have to find friends soon.

“What on earth are you doing?” said a voice.

Peter turned away from the patient—a girl about Alex’s age—and saw the woman staring at him.

“You must be Mina,” he said. Franz had warned him about the Nepali RN who’d help him learn the ropes. Poised in the doorway, slender in a shiny, mottled blouse, with her intently focused eyes and sharp nose, she looked like a snake about to strike. Apparently her father was a retired colonel in the Royal Nepalese Army, and she’d gotten some of the genes.

“The question stands,” she said.

“What on earth I’m doing is trying to get a leech out of this girl’s nose without pulling her whole septum out with it,” he answered, briefly grateful that his patient didn’t speak English. He had a hemostat on the slimy thing, but it wouldn’t budge, and he was pulling so hard the girl had begun to weep. She was his third patient, and he was already flailing, but clearly he couldn’t leave a fat, thumb-sized leech in there.

Mina hissed with exasperation and went to the sink. She filled a glass with water, then brought it over and held it under the girl’s
nose. She stared at Peter with unsettling calm; he stepped back and tried to pay attention to the leech, but it was hard not to notice Mina’s eyes. They were wide-set and such a deep brown that they were almost black. Peter felt a surge of energy pass from her to him—there was hostility, to be sure, but there was something more, something confusing. Her eyes were stunning; in fact,
she
was stunning, though it hadn’t been clear at first. It was as if for just a moment, tending the girl, she let down her scaly armor and revealed an aspect of herself that was genuine and warm.

But then, as if aware of this unintended revelation, she averted her eyes. Once again she looked like an ordinary woman, and an irritated one at that. Even so, Peter couldn’t completely shake the sense of a hidden life, as if she guarded herself from the world because she had something of great value to protect.

The leech let go and plopped into the glass.