Beyond the Summit (9 page)

Wearing a smug expression, Eric dismissed him with a backhand wave. As soon as he tried to stand, the
doko
shifted to the right and he caught himself on an outstretched arm. In a semi-squat and leaning 45 degrees with all his weight on one arm and the
doko
slowly sliding toward the ground, he had to do something fast. Eric pushed off and tried using that momentum to stand upright, but the basket swung the other way and tossed him on the ground. Dorje and three porters came to his rescue.

“Jesus Christ, this thing’s going to crush my spine,” Eric groaned.

Afraid she’d break out laughing, Beth didn’t dare look. Fingers to her tightened lips, she said, “Try walking with it.”

Listing heavily to the right, he took three steps, winced, and yelled, “Get this damn thing off me. It’s obviously a two-man load.”

Snickering, the porters relieved him of the basket and realigned the load. Embarrassed for Eric, Beth whispered, “I’m sure that’s right because you’re the strongest guy I know.”

“Oh yeah?” he said as the old man who had served them
tsampa
walked past carrying the same
doko.
In bare feet with quarter-inch calluses, he climbed up from the river with a steady stride, seldom pausing for breath. “And look at that!” A porter was hiding several large rocks in another man’s
doko
.

Beth laughed. “I bet they’re rivals for the heart of some Sherpani.” She alerted Dorje, but instead of rushing to squash the inevitable conflict, he asked her to quietly point out the two porters involved so he could observe the fun. She stood agape as he explained they often played such tricks. It was expected and relieved their boredom. Shaking her head, she whipped her notebook out and wrote.
The people are even more incredible than the mountains. I’m ashamed of myself for grouping them all as porters and not seeing individuals. They are what I will carry home in my heart, not pictures of Everest.

After cautiously crossing two wire suspension bridges and a narrow cantilever bridge with no handrails, they headed along the stony bed of the valley until they came to the confluence of two rivers below the mountain wall upon which the unseen Namche perched. “It is very steep from here and very high,” Dorje warned as he relieved the ladies of their daypacks. “You will get sick if you do not go
bistarai, bistarai
and drink much water.”

Eric’s ego apparently still suffering, he announced, “I’m going ahead and will meet you in Namche.”

Despite Dorje’s warnings, he took off at full speed and Beth didn’t see him after that. Thirty minutes into the walk, her thighs and calves were burning. Feeling slightly nauseated and with a pounding headache, she collapsed against a boulder and watched the barefoot porters pass with a steady gait, eyes to the ground, no surfeit of breath for conversation, but a shared rock joke that turned up the corners of their mouths. Perhaps that’s what kept them going. She was still exhausted when Dorje arrived with Ruth and Helen.

“You two are incredible,” Beth said, wiping her brow with the bottom of her shirt. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.” As soon as she uttered the words, the last porter bearing rocks trudged past. She just shook her head in disbelief. “How much do they get paid for this torture?” she asked Dorje and found the answer unfathomable: six rupees a day for 60 kilos.
²

More notes for her journal.
Porters are supermen.
Ashamed and feeling like a whiner, she pushed off the wall and plodded on up the trail.

“Most porters are farmers,” Dorje explained walking beside her. “They cannot grow enough to feed their families. So when tourists come, they leave home to work.”

Beth was embarrassed. An educated woman who traveled the world, she had come here with a mindset that was quickly unraveling. “Is it worth leaving their families?”

Staring at the ground, Dorje rolled both shoulders inward with a kind of shrug. “Most go back with very little. Every day, they must pay for food and a place to sleep. Their only hope is to get tips from trekkers.”

“Were you ever a porter?”

With a defensive glance out of the corner of his eye, he replied, “Yes, at sixteen when I came back to Namche and spoke no English.” As if she had criticized him, he left and walked with the non-judgmental ladies. Damn. Her offending tongue had struck again. She’d better get control of it soon because Dorje was an important element of what she’d come for. She’d sensed that from the first moment in Lukla.

Dorje dropped back to Ruth and Helen because walking with Beth was too stimulating and uncomfortable. When she wiped sweat from her forehead, the top of her shirt had ballooned out giving him a full view of her breasts, soft and white like fresh
nak
cream. Even discussing the plight of porters hadn’t provided enough distraction and he had to erase her from his thoughts. Her question about whether he’d been a porter opened doors he couldn’t shut now anyway, so he hauled images from the corners of his brain that had to be dealt with eventually.

Climbing the Namche hill reminded him of returning home at sixteen. After fighting one more monsoon flood that washed away their crops and destroyed the terraces, he couldn’t face starting over again and had to leave the Solu even though it meant being separated from his mother who refused to go without her new husband. His brother Nima was like his other half and could not be left behind. Together they simply headed north and slept in the woods, hungry and cold, with no destination in mind.

“What could have been more important than his sons? You’re too soft and forgiving like mother. The truth is he simply didn’t love us enough.”

“If that’s how you feel, why do you want to see him?”

Rolling onto his side away from Nima, he answered, “Because I have to.” He moved his hip off a stone and pillowed his hands under his head. “Because I have to.”

As they headed north the next day, Dorje pondered Nima’s idea that Mingma couldn’t come for some reason. For ten years he’d gone over every possibility and always arrived at the same conclusion. His father simply didn’t care. The emptiness created by Mingma’s absence was so immense that Dorje was lost in it and couldn’t find his way out. A young boy’s yearning for his father had waged a ten-year war with his feelings of abandonment and anger. By the time he and Nima started the final climb to Namche, his emotions were in tatters.

Rounding the last hill, they stared at the collection of seventy houses built on terraces. “Which house is it?” Nima asked.

Dorje remembered it being up high but which one? The two-story, rectangular buildings all looked the same. After dreaming about returning home a thousand times, he felt like a stranger in his own land. He glanced at the white jagged peaks thrusting into the sky. Snow. He hadn’t seen that since they left. Near the spring where their mother had washed clothes, light-skinned tourists inhabited a forest of orange and blue tents. Watching young children ready to bolt at a stranger’s move, he wondered if any of them could hop on one foot as well as he had.

Thinking about that day with Hillary, he suddenly heard Nima shout, “I know where he is.” With a quick grin displaying the whistling space between his two upper front teeth, he added, “I asked somebody.”

Trying to quell the riot in his stomach, Dorje hooked his arm around his brother’s neck and took a large shaky breath. “Let’s go find him.”

“He’s in that teahouse playing cards but I don’t know which one he is.”

But as soon as they stepped under the low doorway, Dorje knew his father. Seated at a long table, six men were playing cards. Although others had adopted short hair and western clothing from tourists, Mingma sat in his blood-red robe, his long, black hair still pulled back and secured with a ribbon, as striking and handsome as ever with his perfect square features and glinting dark eyes. At the shock of finally seeing his father again, Dorje’s entire being grew faint.

“So which one?” Nima whispered.

Taking a tremulous breath, Dorje acted as though he wasn’t sure. He needed a few more minutes to absorb Mingma's presence unobserved. One of the men dealt cards. As Mingma slid each one into his hand, his eyes skimmed the room, passing over Dorje and Nima with no sign of recognition. He picked up the cards and sorted them. The first player tossed one to the center of the table. Each player in turn slapped his harder than the one before until the last man stood and threw his card down so hard it bent in the middle. Apparently Mingma had won. While shuffling for the next hand, his gaze settled on the boys momentarily.

“Well?” Nima insisted.

His thoughts and words still too fragmented, Dorje wasn’t ready yet. He tried to gather them up but they scurried in confusion. Before he could corner them, his brother grew impatient and spoke. “Mingma?”

If his father hadn’t said that word
waiting,
Dorje might have held himself together. All the years of standing by the path, aching to see that robe sweeping towards him, could not be forgotten. “What do you know of waiting?” he said, his voice gnarling around the words. “I watched and waited ten long years. Where were you?”

Although he’d practiced the speech a hundred times in his head, it stumbled out in clumps of words with pauses, jumps, and starts. “And do you remember telling us how we must be brave? You said you loved us and you promised to come see us as often as you could.”

The card players quickly moved to the door and crowded to get down the stairs. Mingma’s face remained rigid, his gaze unwavering. “What do you want from me?”

Relieved the two of them had shut him out for the moment, Dorje knew he would have said more hurtful things and this wasn’t how he wanted it to be. He wanted to feel like a six-year-old, loving child again.

Mingma rose from the table. “Let’s go home.”

Home! Dorje’s last moments there had been in his father’s lap, crying and begging to stay. Their house stood atop the highest terrace on the east side of the village. As Dorje climbed the narrow, steep path lined with stone fences, all the smells flooded back: barley roasting, snowflakes falling, warm steam coming from the animal’s nostrils, the dust churned up by their hooves. Reaching the house, he paused in front, hearing voices from the lower storage room next to the animals.

“Who’s that?” he asked after having remained silent since leaving the teahouse.

“Tibetan refugees,” his father replied. “They arrive hungry and cold with nothing but a few clothes. Many of their children died while crossing over the Nangpa La. I let them stay here until they’ve recovered enough to move on to other parts of Nepal or India, as far from the Chinese as they can get.”

Dorje’s anger softened thinking his father may have sheltered hundreds in the nine years since the uprising. Entering the dark, lower room where animals were kept at night, he felt the familiar warmth of their bodies. He’d missed nuzzling against their dense outer coats and tasting their sweet
nak
curds. Brushing against them, he worked his way to the winding staircase that led to the living quarters on the second floor.

As he ducked under the doorway, he discovered something unexpected. A heavy woman with a bulbous growth on her neck as thick as an arm was making
chapatis
. Mingma introduced their aunt, Droma Sunjo. “And this is your cousin Dawa,” he added when a short, squat body that seemed all out of proportion ambled out of the corner, tilting awkwardly left and right. A large, bloated stomach forced the truncated limbs outward. It was a boy of about twelve with thin hair and dry skin of an odd yellowish hue. The puffy face with thick lips and flattened nose crinkled into a vacant smile.