Right of Thirst (20 page)

“Can I stay with you again?” Elise asked, later, as we walked to our tents after dinner.

“Of course.”

She hesitated, and began to cry a little.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, composing herself. “All I want now is to go home.”

She retrieved her sleeping bag, and when we reached my tent I unzipped the door, and held it for her as she ducked inside. I waited for a few moments, giving her time to undress and get in her sleeping bag, and then I followed. I undressed as well, inside my bag, and we lay beside each other in the dark, listening to the river.

“I feel like I am somewhere else,” she said. “I do not understand how he could do this.”

I found myself thinking of the corpses on the wall, and whether they had been carried down, and how it had been done. I imagined wrists and ankles lashed to poles, pendulous necks and open mouths, blood dripping on the rocks. I imagined them laid side by side on the ground, and photographed, as the soldiers posed smiling above them.

“He knew what he was doing,” I said. “He just didn't know what it felt like to do it.”

“It does not matter,” she said. “They are dead anyway for nothing.”

“Yes,” I said. “But his reasons were complex.”

“Why are you defending him?” she said, accusingly. “He is a murderer, even if they ordered him to do it. I thought he was different, but he is not. All of them are the same. And now there is no camp because of them. No research, nothing.”

I realized she was wiping her eyes in the dark beside me.

“And Homa,” she continued. “Everything is terrible for her and that is for nothing also.”

She was so young, I thought, so certain in her convictions, and so open to them. I envied her full heart, and the depth of her outrage, and wondered why I could not also rise, or rise fully. If I felt raw, raked and open, as I knew I did, it came upon me in secret ways, bubbling out of the deep, and caught me by surprise, and did not fully reveal itself to my conscious mind, like a flicker in the corner of my eye that vanished when I turned to look.

“I'm not defending him,” I said. “I'm trying to understand him.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“What did he say to you when he came up here earlier?”

“He was asking for my forgiveness.”

“Why would he ask this from you?”

“His father died when he was young. He lives in a brutal and corrupt country. He can barely support his family. He looks up to me because he thinks I'm rich and successful, and he killed those men because he's desperate to distinguish himself. It's not that complicated.”

“So you are saying that it is okay what he has done.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Did you forgive him?”

I thought for a while.

“Forgiveness isn't the right word,” I said.

“Then what is the right word?”

“Sadness,” I said. “I'm sad for him.”

“Maybe you are right, that he is not so bad on his own,” she said, a few moments later. “But together they are like monsters. They could do anything.”

We stopped talking for a while after that, but neither of us could sleep. She shifted fitfully beside me. Long minutes passed. I listened to her breathing, and my own.

And then, without thinking, I was rolling over on my side to face her, and I was reaching out, and my hand was against her cheek, and then I was stroking her hair.

She took a breath, and then sat up in her sleeping bag. I froze, my face burning in the darkness. I withdrew my hand, and began to murmur my apologies, because there was no mistaking my intentions. For a terrible moment I thought she was going to turn on her headlamp.

But she didn't. Instead, she reached out, and pulled me down with her as she lay back again, and her own breath was quickening, and she was reaching for the zipper on her sleeping bag, drawing it down, and then I kissed her. It stunned me, to kiss her like that, as if I were plunging into a hot bath, and then I felt her arms around me, her hands finding their way beneath my shirt to the flushed bare skin of my back. I began to fumble with her thin fleece sleeping clothes, but she stopped me.

“Wait,” she said, pushing me off gently, and I sat back as she asked, my heart pounding.

She undressed, deliberately and carefully, putting her clothes to the side. I listened to her breathing, and my own, and in the darkness of the tent I could just make out the white form of her body on the sleeping bag. I pulled off my shirt, and then she
reached out and pulled me down against her, her mouth rising up to mine, the warmth of her body against me, and then it was the bath again, the pool, the breathing, the curves of her hips and her openness, my hands on her body, and then the lift of her pelvis and the deep, breathtaking shock, her upturned face beneath me, the heat of her breath in my ear, my hands tight on her hips, the rocking and the sound of it, and the gasps we both made.

It was over in only a few moments, but with her sleeping bag below us and mine above, I felt as though the world had changed entirely around me once again. It was dizzying, as we lay in that strange familiarity that men and women have at such times, both foreign and together.

We lay there, and I was careful not to overwhelm her with tenderness, or with speech. My hand rested on her belly, and during those minutes I felt as though I'd been emptied entirely, that nothing else was there—not the soldiers, not the corpses on the mountainside, none of it. It was just her body beside me, and my hand, and her warmth beneath it. She was wide awake, and I could see her blinking in the near darkness.

“I am thinking about my life,” she said, after a long while. “About what I want to do. About having children. Many things. I can't stop. I'm just lying here and doing this.”

“Do you want to have children?”

“Of course. When I have finished my degree.”

She paused, hesitating, and I could feel it all begin to recede.

“I have a partner,” she said, finally.

“You're talking about Scott Coles, aren't you?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes,” she said. “But how did you know?”

“It was an educated guess.”

“He's trying very hard to be good,” she said. “He wants to be
good. But then he sleeps with other girls. I do not know, but I think so. And he says he will come here to help us, but he does not come. Sometimes I think he likes giving his speeches more than he likes working here.”

“He told me just the opposite,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “He always says this. He does raise the money. He is very honest with the money. But he likes the audience also.”

“How long have you known him?”

“I met him a few years ago,” she said. “Before the earthquake. We were at a conference together. It was in Berlin.”

“And you've been in a relationship since then?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I do not see him so often. Always he is traveling, raising money. Always this is so important.”

“It's hard to raise money for anything,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “He started the camps. He provides money for them. He wants to do good. It's true.”

“What did he do before all of this? He said he was a climber.”

“He was a climber. He owned a climbing shop in California.”

She raised herself on her elbow, and turned toward me in the dark.

“He is not young anymore,” she said. “And his family, they are more successful than him. His brothers and his father. So he is angry with them. Very angry, I think.”

“Was he married? Does he have children?”

“He was married. He has a daughter and a son also. I have never met them. They are young. He does not see them often either. They live with their mother.”

“He told me he almost climbed an eight-thousand-meter peak,” I said. “He told me he decided to do relief work when he
saw some climbers killed in front of him. He said that he turned around when the summit was in his reach.”

She sighed.

“Yes,” she said, lying down again. “He tells this story. But I am not sure about it.”

“What do you mean?”

She thought for a moment before answering.

“He did try to climb an eight-thousand-meter peak. It was a big mountain, very dangerous. And there were climbers killed up high in an avalanche. But I think it was someone else who saw them and turned back, not him. And he wants very much to have this memory. So he says it is his.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He is a good climber lower down,” she said. “He is strong. But he has problems with altitude. He gets sick. Some people are this way. Some people who are strong lower down are weak up high.”

“Have you climbed with him?”

“Yes,” she said. “We climbed Mont Blanc together. Not so high. Only five thousand meters. But he had some trouble anyway.”

“Altitude sickness is unpredictable,” I said. “That doesn't necessarily mean anything.”

“I know,” she said, anxiously. “But last year I met someone who knows Scott also. A climber. It is a small community. I asked him about Scott and the expedition. He said he heard how in the beginning Scott is always saying how strong he was, how fast. How he will be a famous climber. But when they got to the mountain he could do nothing. He only reached camp two and then he had to go down again. He tried this several times, but each time it was the same. The others were laughing at him, so he went home before they finished. That is what he
told me. He was not with them, but still I think this is what happened.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You must not tell him if you see him again. I feel bad for Scott about this.”

I took a deep breath, and said what I knew I shouldn't.

“Elise,” I said, “what are you doing with him? Can't you see that he's not what he seems?”

“I think you are a little bit unfair,” she said, sadly. “And I am not so serious about him anymore. But he wants to be better. He wants to believe what he says. It is not all for show.”

I was silent.

“I think I have said too much,” she said, uneasily, after a while. “I like him, you know? I cannot help this.”

She turned then, and leaned forward, and kissed my cheek, and then she sat up, and put her sleeping clothes back on.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I'm a little bit cold.”

The next morning we woke early, just after sunrise, and dressed, and left the tent. We said little. But from the first she didn't meet my eye, or kiss me again. Instead, she smiled and looked away. I saw it immediately, without a word being spoken.

We drank our tea, and ate some cold chapati, and then we packed up and started walking down the path by the river in the cold of the morning, as the valley narrowed around us, and the walls around us became closer and steeper.

As the light began to flood into the canyon I felt my attention turn to the days ahead for the first time. We were safe, and were going home, and the events of the past few days had receded just enough to let me begin to think of other things. I thought about Elise, and her silence, and what it meant. I felt entirely bewildered. The landscape around us felt both endlessly the same and infused with tiny details—a scarlet pinpoint flower among cactus spines, or the hump of glistening river as it rose unbroken over a deep rock. I imagined there were fish, as in the lake—silver streaks, cold and effortless.

An hour passed, and she began to whistle tunelessly, as if unaware of what she was doing. For most of the morning we were all like that; aware of one another, but also lost in our own thoughts.
The mind wanders at such times—it goes back and forth, as if released, here and there, present and past. Sometimes there was the outside world, the white stroke of a distant waterfall, or the sudden angular presence of a tiny tree on the rock wall two hundred feet above us, where somehow a blown seed had stuck, and other times there was nothing but the interior, whatever it may be—the unconscious mind, spilling out memories like so many colored marbles on the floor. In and out I went, thinking about the path ahead, or trees on hillsides, and then my dog at home, and what we'd manage for lunch, and the invading tribes of prehistory, with their Asian off-colored eyes, whose genes had somehow also been blown up these gorges and found purchase. It was dizzying, in a way, and impossible to keep track of, and I imagined a graph of my own thoughts, each thought a single point, scattered like seed corn on a table, some revisited again and again, glowing, and others only once. Elise whistled on, just ahead, and Rai, for his part, simply continued, deliberate and steady. The others felt like shadows behind me.

It went like that—flights of memory, then back in the moment. Over and over again I found myself looking at her, then at the ground passing beneath my feet. The ridges changed as slowly as an hour hand above us.

Later that morning, at a bend, we came to a footbridge across the river. The bridge was made from logs—four of them, irregular, rough, lashed together with rope, the whole of it resting on loose stone pilings. From a distance, it looked dark and unnatural. There was no railing of any kind, and the logs themselves were slick from the spray of the river, which boiled under them. The path itself was so little used that often there was no trace of it along the riverbank—it eased in and out of existence. But now this, a crude and miraculous bridge, like an artifact.

The logs were large ones, weathered and cracked, yet there
were no such trees anywhere nearby. Someone must have carried them there. The bridge was entirely unexpected, and reminded me somehow of Elise's solar shower, which she had lashed to the outside of her pack.

“Who put it here?” I asked Rai.

“The local people do this,” he said, “where the river is too deep and you have to cross.”

“How old is it, do you think? It looks like it's been here for a long time.”

“I don't know,” he replied. The bridge was not a compelling object for him, but it fascinated me. The logs might have been there for fifty years, or more—in the dry air, despite the spray from the river, the wood probably would last forever. No doubt the ropes lashing it all together needed to be replaced every so often, and the pilings repaired from time to time, but whoever did this work was nowhere to be seen.

“Is there another village around here?”

Rai shrugged in his familiar way.

“I don't know,” he repeated.

It was a bad bridge, I thought—treacherous, the logs unimproved in any way, without a railing, over a section of river that looked both dangerous and deep.

We crossed it one by one, carefully. First Rai, then Elise and me, then Ali and his nephew, and finally the soldier. The logs were slick, and shook beneath our weight, and the rapids flashed in the gaps between them. I eased myself out, placing my boots carefully, knowing all the while that I wasn't going to fall off, that I'd make it fine, as the others had done.

The soldier, however, did slip midway out, and the weight of his load became evident, pulling him to one side for an instant, spinning his arms for an anxious moment. But he recovered well, and he joined the rest of us on the far bank, laughing as he
stepped off the end of the logs onto the sheets of gravel again.

From the other side of the river, I could see why the bridge had been necessary—the bank disappeared just past the bend, and the river ran close along the valley wall, which was steep enough to make walking impossible. But where we stood, the valley widened, and there were more cactus and scrub pines, some of which came to our shoulders. The ground, in places, was sandy, and the ridges, on that side of the river, were several hundred meters away. For a while we were walking on a kind of plain. In a few minutes, the bridge was out of sight, and the path once more became difficult to follow.

“There are flies,” Elise said, and as she spoke I was bitten also.

The flies themselves were unfamiliar to me—gray rather than black, longer and thinner than horseflies, they stung fiercely. Suddenly they were everywhere. We were getting lower, I realized—the vegetation was increasing around us, inching farther away from the river's edge, and now this. They came for us by the dozen. Several times, when I slapped them before they'd bitten, there was a scarlet smear of blood. Undoubtedly it was the blood of animals—mountain sheep, foxes, and birds—but I thought of the army also, passing that way only a few days before, and wondered if some of it was human.

We walked fast, slapping at them, waving our hands around our faces, but then, as the valley wall closed with the river again, as the pines thinned and disappeared, the wind picked up, and the flies vanished as quickly as they had come. It was a blessed relief. One had bitten me on the tip of my little finger, and it itched and throbbed until I dipped it into the icy river.

We slowed down again. The sun was directly overhead, and already, though perhaps we'd descended only a few thousand feet, it was noticeably warmer than it had been. Lower, I knew,
it would become hot, but then it was simply pleasant, in the cool air, with the river clenching and unclenching beside us—strips of white water, followed by long sheets of calm. The valley had narrowed again, and was as it had been. Rai and the others moved ahead of us down the trail.

“You have these experiences,” Elise said suddenly, turning to me. “And sometimes they are very strong ones. And then they are over, but you cannot say what they mean. And then you have other ones. And you cannot say what they mean. You just go on. Maybe you are happy, maybe you are scared, maybe you are sad. But you want to say, I learn this, or I learn that, or I understand better. But maybe you don't understand better, and it is not so easy to say what you learn and what you don't learn. Do you know?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

We continued in silence for a while.

“I'm so glad I met you, you know,” I said, quietly. “You're a wonderful young woman. You've given me hope. Whatever happens I want you to know that.”

“Thank you,” she said, awkwardly, beginning to blush in the sun. A moment passed, and then finally she turned to me.

“It is okay,” she said. “What happened. It was nice. But no more. I need to tell you this.”

“Why?”

“For me it is not the same,” she said, simply. “I like you. But not so much in that way. And there is Scott, also. I am feeling a little bit guilty. It is too confusing. So I'm sorry.”

I looked at her, and though my face flushed, I had been expecting her words all morning.

“It's all right, Elise,” I said, after a moment, with difficulty. “But I want you to know it meant a lot to me. I hope I didn't take advantage of you, and please forgive me if I did.”

She stepped up close, and put her hand on my arm.

“I did not do it because I felt sorry for you,” she said, looking at me intently. “I did it because I wanted to also. And I liked it also. It felt very nice.”

“Thank you,” I replied, before turning away. I knew I was on the edge of tears, and I wanted very much to hide this fact from her. Her kindness, her concern for my dignity—I felt entirely naked before her, and a wave of longing passed through me. Not only for her, but for my own past as well, for Rachel, and the choices I'd made, and those early years, when I was handsome and strong and full of my own promise, when we loved one another, and our son was coming, when the future was bright, and the path was straight.