He rinsed out a tin cup at the small metal sink in the corner, filled it with water, and held it to Ko’s lips. His son did not react at first but when Shan tipped it, letting some of the moisture spill onto his lips, Ko reflexively swallowed and drank half the cup. His eyes wandered, still unfocused, but did not find Shan.
“I have had a pleasant visit in the mountains,” Shan heard himself say in a whisper. “There is a place I will show you, with waterfalls and butterflies. You will come stay with me in my cottage in the hills by that snow-topped mountain you look at. Little birds fly in my window.” At first he wasn’t entirely sure why he lied, then he realized it was simply because he couldn’t bear to tell the truth.
“From the Red East rises the sun,” Ko suddenly said in a wooden voice. “There appears our Mao tse-tung.” He rocked back and forth. His fingers began to tremble. He repeated the words, putting them to a feeble melody. He was singing the Party’s favorite anthem, The East is Red.
Shan shuddered then gently placed two fingers on his son’s lips to silence him and bent closer to his ear. “Living water needs living fire to boil,” he whispered. “Lean over the fishing rock and dip the clear, deep current.” The words of the ancient poet Su tung-po came out uninvited, but he did not cease speaking them when he recognized them, a thousand-year-old poem that was one of his father’s favorites:
Store the spring moon in a big gourd, return it to the jar Frothy water, simmering, whirls bits of tea Pour it and hear the sound of wind in pines.
His son’s eyes blinked and he turned in the direction of the sound. For a moment Shan thought he might have seen a flicker of recognition in Ko’s eyes, then his son looked away, staring in confusion at Shan’s hand, entwined with his own. Shan repeated the poem again, all of it this time. Ko cocked his head toward the sky and a vacant grin crossed his face.
One of the many old lamas Shan had known in his gulag camp had, like Shan, been a rare survivor of such a knob medical facility. They had spoken about it once, on a frigid winter night as they watched the stars. Shan had confessed that he could not explain how he had survived, could not even find words to explain how he had felt, only that when he was released he had been amazed to find only sixty days, and not ten years, had passed.
“Those soldier doctors had no feeling for the truth of what they do,” the lama had explained. “They think they can destroy you by breaking your body. It isn’t like that.”
Shan had always known better than to ask questions of such men. He had stayed silent, pointing out a shooting star.
“There are many levels of hell,” the lama went on. “They don’t exist to test your body or mind but to test your soul. I realized that the doctors were but smiths at the forge who push the iron into the furnace, then pound it with hammers. The only thing of any importance is going on inside the iron. You drift in and out of consciousness. You live in dreams and nightmares all day and night, in the furnace, under the hammer. What brings you back are the moments when you wake and find a little shard of reality. That’s what keeps you anchored to the real world, so you don’t entirely drift away. A monk with me had a hummingbird feather, another a tiny piece of sacred wood. I had a small turquoise pebble my mother had given me as a boy. I kept it in my mouth for days at a time.”
When the alarm finally came it was not a claxon in the hallway but a chicken from the beds. One of the sleeping men had awakened, was pointing at Shan and crowing like a rooster.
Shan was on the man in an instant, injecting the syringe into his thigh, apologizing as he did so, straightening his blankets as the man slumped back into his pillow. When he looked back, Ko was staring at the horizon again. Shan stroked his cheek for a moment, took a step toward the door then paused. He moved quickly to the window and wiped a pane with his sleeve, so Ko could see the mountains more clearly, then lifted one of the sheets of paper covered with triangles and grabbed the pencil from his son’s crate. On the reverse of the paper he quickly wrote the ancient poem then, before slipping out into the hall, he left it in the pocket of Ko’s shirt. Something inside Ko had heard, he was certain, and Shan was leaving him a little shard of reality.
Chapter Eight
After five falls you die. The warning about fatigue in climbing ropes had been the first of the many warnings he had received during his first visit to the base camp. Kypo had offered no greeting before tossing the length of rope Shan now held. He had simply appeared as Shan sipped his morning tea by his front door and thrown the rope at him with a resentful expression. One end of the rope had been cut; the other, stretched and frayed, had been snapped by a heavy load. The thick kernmantle ropes took amazing abuse on the high summits, but they were retired to serve as base camp laundry lines after taking the stress of five falls.
“I was at the first advance camp yesterday,” Kypo explained. “I asked a porter why this piece of junk was there. He said he thought he should keep it because it was Tenzin’s rope, the one he was using when he died.”
“But he would never-”
“Right,” Kypo interrupted. They both knew a seasoned sherpa would have checked his rope before climbing. “Tenzin was just setting a practice wall, for customers to use while acclimatizing for the final climb.”
Shan looked at the crushed, frayed end of the rope. He recalled Tenzin yelling at a porter for stepping on a rope in camp. A careless step could press mineral particles into the rope, which would gradually cut the fibers.
“We don’t know where this has been for certain. I wasn’t there when it was cut off him.”
“No,” Shan agreed. “I thought he was free climbing and slipped.” Tenzin had been renowned for his unassisted climbs up sheer rock faces.
“It looked like he was just taking some equipment to the bottom of the wall, a quick up and down.” Kypo was silent a moment, clearly disturbed by the thought that his friend Tenzin, who had climbed the summit with him, had died from such an obvious mistake. “It was written that the mountain would call him,” he murmured. It sounded like he had been speaking with his mother.
“The rope came from the Americans’ supplies,” Shan observed. “It’s their advance camp.”
“Tsipon wanted Tenzin and me to take the Americans on the final leg to the top. I told Tsipon I would think about it.”
Shan considered the edge of emotion in the Tibetan’s voice. “You don’t trust Yates?”
“He plays with the truth. I was in Tsipon’s office when Yates first came in to speak about moving his spring climbs from Nepal to here. Tsipon said Yates should come with him to apply for the permits the next day, since foreigners always get sent to the front of the line. Yates declined, saying he had to go to Shigatse on business. But the next day I saw him in the opposite direction of Shigatse, standing in a field of barley.”
Shan cocked his head, not sure he had heard correctly. “Standing in a field doing what?”
“All by himself, tramping down some poor farmer’s crop, tearing apart an old cairn in the center, the bastard.”
“He lied?”
“He lied, then paid the farmer twenty dollars when the man discovered what he’d done. Told him to keep quiet about it.”
“But you spoke with the farmer,” Shan surmised.
“When I passed on my return. The farmer said Yates had gotten out of his car and kept looking at the sky, as if expecting something to come down and meet him.”
“He must have had a satellite phone and was trying to get reception.”