Right of Thirst (5 page)

“Such as?”

He swallowed.

“People who like the idea of relief work more than actually doing it. People who think it's a vacation. It's not a vacation. It's a reduction to the essentials. You see exactly what is important and what isn't. It's deeply satisfying to dig a well for a village that hasn't ever had one before. Or build a school. It really is like nothing else.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, took another swallow
of wine. He jerked his chin toward the other tables.

“These people here,” he said. “They have no idea. They have no idea how big the world really is. They're thinking only about themselves—their own lives and careers. Maybe they're thinking about their children's lives and careers. They're telling their kids to become lawyers and bankers and stockbrokers. They're telling them to compete and win and get rich, that's it. They're oblivious, they really are. They don't know what's important. They think you get a prize at the end, and you don't. But saving people from hunger and disease, that's important. That actually matters.”

He had a look in his eye again, and hadn't finished chewing, and I could see the red meat and wine in his mouth. The profusion of individual gray hairs on his head stood out in the dim lighting against the youthful black of the rest.

“How old are you?” he asked, bluntly.

“I'm fifty-eight.”

“Do you have any health problems?”

“Nothing significant.”

“Conditions are rough. You should understand that. You'd be living out of a tent. There won't be any modern conveniences.”

I took another sip of wine.

“Do you have a family? Even three months is a long time up there.”

“I've had some personal issues recently. I'm alone now. My son lives in New York.”

“Ah,” he said, as if something had become clear to him. I felt my cheeks flush.

“It's not a bad way to start again,” he said, thoughtfully, and not unkindly, after a moment. “It worked for me.”

I did not reply.

He finished off the last of the meat, eating with evident pleasure, drank the rest of the wine, and then, as he wiped his mouth
for the last time, he thanked me for dinner.

“I hope you'll join us,” he said, after I paid the bill, and we stood outside the restaurant in the warm night. “I've talked to a few others, but they're much younger, and have very little experience. We need someone like you. We need someone who knows what they're doing.”

With that, he shook my hand, firmly.

“You have my card,” he said, looking me in the eye, bringing the evening to an end. “I hope to hear from you.”

“Do you need a ride to your hotel?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” he said. “It's not far. I'm used to walking.”

I said good night, and watched him for a moment as he strode off purposefully toward the center of campus, head up, as if he had an appointment to keep.

As I stood on the street, I felt as though I was on the cusp of an untraceable disappearance, that I was very close to being swept under entirely. I'd lived in that town for nearly thirty years, and right then it meant nothing to me, no more than the Atlanta of my youth. It was just another place, another stop along the way, full of strange young faces, ten thousand at a time, in four-year cycles, passing through.

I suppose another world was what I wanted most.

The days were blinding and bright and deep. Silent, also, except for the wind and the river in the background. When it was still, at night, the air was like a pane of ice. Sound carried a great distance—footsteps on the gravel, voices from the cook tent. There were birds—a kind of small brown gull, sweeping in for the garbage. Apart from them, and the villagers below us, the place was empty. When I first stepped out of the helicopter, I felt as though I'd landed on the surface of the moon.

Our five tents sat clustered around one another on a field of boulders at the base of a thousand-meter cliff. Two of them—the cook tent and the dining tent—were canvas, tall enough to stand in. The other three were modern two-man domes, one blue, one yellow, and one green, where we slept. They were the single source of color on the field.

It was the flattest place for miles, a few hundred yards of gently sloping ground, between the steep flank of the wall rising above it and the path descending sharply through the boulders to the river below.

On the far side of the river, immense gray granite walls swept up to the tips of the ridges. There were patches of snow, icefalls, streams of running water. Deep in the valley, the day was shortened by the
ridges on either side, and the escarpment of snow-covered peaks I knew was there, stretching northward, could not be seen.

Above it all, the sky presided like the most radiant of blue pools, stained with the faintest hint of black.

A mile or so below us, beside the river, stood a village of some thirty homes, and if we walked to the edge of the field and part-way down the slope we could see it. Less than a hundred miles to the north, countless identical villages lay in ruins, and tens of thousands of people lay dead. But there, just south enough, nothing had been touched.

The villagers grew barley and wheat on terraces and apricots in orchards and the sudden emerald and yellow fields leapt up around the houses. From a distance, the village was entirely lovely, with the gray and white snowmelt of the river, and the polished granite boulders, and the brown-walled orchard full of apricot trees, and the high-altitude sun pouring down over everything. In the early evenings, the gentle yellow of the lanterns flowed out of the windows of the mud homes, and sometimes I'd catch a whiff of smoke in the air. But the lanterns didn't burn for long, and a few minutes after sunset the village went quiet and disappeared into the darkness.

For the first few days I had a headache. My pulse pounded in my temples, and when I bent forward to put on my boots I could see the afterimage of my retina, in black and white—blood vessels pulsing in my own eye. A distortion of the globe, perhaps, due to the lower pressure at altitude. That, and dehydration—the dry air sucked the moisture out of us, even without exertion, and it was an effort to drink glass after glass of cold, iodinated water from the river, although I got used to that as well.

At night, when I woke up, I'd listen to the wind rustle against my tent, warm in my sleeping bag, watching my breath enter the air. I soon gave up on the effort of going outside to urinate; when
the urge came I made do with a bottle I kept for the purpose, screwed tight, in a pocket sewn to the wall. Despite the cold, I often kept the door partly unzipped, so I could look up from where I lay into the night sky, which seemed active and alive. The sky was entirely unlike the skies I knew—the skies of green trees and cornfields and thunderstorms. I saw shooting star after shooting star, and what appeared to be satellites—silver points crossing rapidly from east to west, or west to east. The Milky Way, also, white as a brushstroke when the moon was down, and then the moon itself, rising over the ridges like a perfect circle of ash. It looked entirely cold and inanimate to me, with none of the tenderness it had in the lowlands to the south. The people here lived at the edges of what was possible—only a few places had such high permanent towns, though the village below us was hardly a town. It was more a rough collection of hardship and unwritten history, and the villagers themselves seemed like visitors as well despite all their centuries of presence. When they left the confines of their village it was with a singular purpose in mind—the gathering of wood, the collection of wandering animals.

That tiny cluster of tents on the windswept field of stones, the altitude, the ridges, the sky overhead, the knowledge that I was as far away from anything I knew as I could possibly be, out beyond the edge of the modern world—it filled me with unease, but also, at first, with a profound sense of relief. For a little while I was gone, and had another role entirely to assume, in a place where no one knew me, where I might be anyone, or anything, like an anonymous traveler in a foreign city.

If ever there was a place for the imagining of ghosts, that was it. I've never been superstitious, but up there, on the wide high reaches, with so many thousands buried alive only a few miles to the north and only a few months ago, absorbed into the ground as if they'd never been there at all—I thought about them, or
tried to. It was difficult to imagine them. What I felt instead was a nameless sense of presence, of clarity and empty space.

Sometimes I'd try to read by a tiny light on a wand clipped to the fire-warning tag on the wall of the tent. I hadn't brought many books, and had gone for density and small type as a result.
A History of the British Raj, 1800 to 1900
.
Islam, an Introduction
.
Birds of West Asia
. But the books bored me, and I'd wished I'd been more honest in my choices. All that talk of pig grease on cartridge cases, all that dry commentary on the Black Hole of Calcutta, all those steam locomotives and transformative institutions (bureaucracies, universities)—it seemed almost entirely irrelevant. But Genghis Khan was only thirty generations away, as Elise, the German geneticist, had told me at dinner. Only thirty men and women separated his time from ours.

I could only wonder what the villagers talked about as they lay down in their dark houses to sleep, and what they thought of us in our tents above them. On the day we arrived, the chartered Russian pilots, in their white dress shirts with blue epaulets, had roared over the village one by one before landing on the field. We'd sat in the windowless back, on jump seats with the cargo.

I've always loved things like that—industrial machines, helicopters and ships and heavy equipment. I remember a childhood trip to the Hoover Dam, and how pleased I had been to be deep beside the turbines, with steel shafts the size of backyard oaks spinning like mirrors beneath my fingers, and the vast cool presence of Lake Mead above me. At times I wonder whether I would have been happy as an engineer, the kind of man who could look at a mountain of rock and say—
the diverting channel will go here, and then we will start on the spillway. A thousand men and five years should do it
. The world allows hardly anyone such acts, though, in anything.

For the first time in months I was not alone.

Sanjit Rai, our liaison officer, was a few inches taller than I was, with broad military shoulders, a trim, narrow waist, and a black mustache that he had a habit of stroking. His features were sharp, his black eyes set narrowly beside the curve of his nose, with a receding chin, and a prominent Adam's apple that one noticed when he swallowed. When one looked at him directly he was handsome enough, but in profile his nose was too large and his chin too small. His skin was brown, his hair curly and black, his irregular teeth a little yellow from the cigarettes. He had a quick intelligence, and took obvious pleasure in his English, which, though accented, was nearly flawless. It was clear from the start that he enjoyed matching wits with me.

We had many conversations in the dining tent. When the wind was up, and in the evenings, in the cold, we'd keep the elegant Japanese kerosene heater going full blast, sit close to it, and sip a little of the cheap local rum he'd brought with him. Every so often I'd smoke one of his cigarettes, which I hadn't done in decades. At first, before we knew each other, every conversation was another performance. I was trying to pretend my life was something else, and he was giving voice to his ambition, though I don't think he realized it. I believe he thought he was demonstrating our equality,
that he was a man of substance also. Once, early on, I made the mistake of answering his inappropriate question of how much money I made each year. I realized my error immediately, but only magnified it by saying that it wasn't really a great deal back home. He was a little drunk, which is undoubtedly why he asked the question at all, but he simply nodded and said nothing, and we both got a little drunker. Even then I couldn't help myself, I couldn't stop myself from entering the dance of men, with all its assessments and judgments and subtle assertions of power. Instead I took to it as eagerly as ever, relieved to find the instinct within me still. Elise left us to it, retreating with her tea to her tent, or writing in her journal in the corner, though occasionally she would roll her eyes at something one of us said.

Sometimes, no matter his care, his comments took on an edge that flashed all the more brightly when he took them back, or made a joke.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “A rich man like you. Why did you come all this way?”

“I needed an adventure,” I replied. Elise looked up from the corner for a moment, then turned back to her journal.

“An adventure?” He didn't laugh, but he smiled. “I thought it was for good works.”

“That, too.”

He pointed to the heater. “You see this?”

“The heater?”

“The heater. Yes. In this country, we never build that. We just burn all the wood, then we freeze. And then we do not understand why we are freezing. And then we turn to God.”

“Ah,” I said. “You're a patriot.” It was the kind of comment I'd regret the next day. A certain deliberately arch tone, a struggle for cleverness with a man more than twenty years my junior.

He didn't answer at first. Instead, he poured himself some more rum.

“I am a patriot,” he said. “But I also hate my country.” He took a drag on his cigarette, smiled, and handed me the bottle. “Here, Doctor,” he said, “have some more.”

“Why do you hate your country?”

He stroked his mustache, and thought for a moment about his answer.

“I hate what we are not,” he said, at last, and took a sip from his glass.

For him, the rum was significant. Technically he was on duty all the time, though no one was there to tell him so. But as time passed I came to recognize the small changes in his demeanor. In the day, he was more formal, his gestures to the cooks curt and imperious. He was less familiar with me as well. But after dinner, in the privacy of the dining tent, he relaxed and began his journey westward—the rum, the occasional talk about women, the photograph of his wife and daughters he showed to me more than once.

He asked me about my family also.

“My wife died recently,” I said. “I have a grown son.”

“Oh,” he said, with a sympathetic look.

Impulsively I reached into my wallet, as he had done, and removed the photograph of them both together, taken when Eric was a small boy. He sat in her lap, and Rachel smiled for the camera. She looked happy. I handed him the photograph, and he studied it for a few seconds.

“She is very beautiful,” he said. “And your son. I am sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said, and put the photograph away again.

“I also hope for a son,” Rai said, after a moment. “I have only girls.”

I smiled politely, and suddenly wondered why on earth I'd showed the photograph to him.

He wore his pistol all the time. It looked crude, but I knew firsthand that it worked well, because one morning, with nothing to do once the loads had been dropped from the helicopters, we went out and shot it.

We passed the piles of provisions—mostly tins of food strapped to wooden pallets—and made our way to the cliffs several hundred meters from our cluster of tents across the sheets of gray boulders and gravel.

Each of us had an armful of empty brown glass and clear plastic bottles. We set them down at the sharp edge of the shadow cast by the cliff. The cliff was silent and dark, not yet touched by the sun. He turned, and took twenty paces back on the sunlit ground.

There was no wind. It was almost warm standing in our jackets in the sun. He took off his sunglasses, breathed on the lenses, polished them with the corner of his shirt, and put them back on. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a clump of cotton wool, which he tore into four pieces.

“For the ears,” he said, rolling the cotton into balls and handing two of them to me. I followed his lead, and put them in.

“Okay,” he said. “Look at the front sight. The bottle is blurry. Put the front sight just below the bottle.”

I hadn't fired a gun since childhood. He took the pistol out of the holster, and pulled back the slide to chamber a round.

“Arms straight,” he said, extending the gun. “Both hands. Feet and shoulders parallel. The bottle is blurry. Look at the front sight. Understood?”

His expression hardened.

“I will show you,” he said, and fired.

His first shot missed—a jet of gravel leapt up a few inches
from the bottle—but then he was on. The glass exploded, and he turned for the next. Two rapid shots; the plastic bottle whipped one way, then the other. On to the next, two shots, then three more, and suddenly the gun was empty, locked open and smoking, the sound of the shots slapping against the cliffs and echoing down the valley. My ears rang, despite the cotton.

“You're very good at this,” I said, speaking loudly because of the cotton in my ears, and his face softened with pleasure.

“I am regiment pistol champion,” he said. “But this gun is for military service, not for targets. I have a better one for matches.”

“What kind of gun is it?”

“Russian Makarov. We make them also. Very simple and reliable.”

Later, he would tell me that colonels and generals were given modern European weapons, jet black and expensive, as a sign of arrival. But he was only a captain.

He slapped in a new clip, chambered a round, and handed the warm gun to me.

“Okay,” he said. “Arms straight. Look at the front sight. The bottle is blurry.”

I stood awkwardly, trying to imitate the ease of his stance. He stood just behind me, eyeing me critically, and then he reached out and adjusted my shoulders.

“Use one eye only,” he said, “and look.” He waited a moment. “Okay,” he said.

I pulled the trigger, and the pistol cracked and jumped in my hand—a good-natured punch, no more. I was aiming at the glass, because I wanted to see the bottle shatter. But I missed, and the bullet went off into the shadows, and I heard the distinct shriek of a ricochet.

“Too high,” he said, and I fired again, closer this time, into the sand on the right.

“Deep breath,” he said, and I did as I was told, focusing on the little black line of the sight, aligning it as best I could beneath the vague brown form of the bottle. I felt the trigger give, and as the jolt traveled up my arm, the bottle exploded, just as it had done for him.

“Good,” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder.

Later, when the glass was all in pieces and the plastic water bottles were full of holes, and I could still feel the satisfaction of the pistol's recoil in my hands, Elise gave me a stern, disappointed look. She was sitting in the dining tent, and as we passed the open doorway, her eyes met mine. She said nothing, but I felt it, and felt faintly ashamed. The first of the refugees were expected any day, and the tents had not yet been set up. Rai had spent the time going through the provisions, leisurely checking his manifest, and drinking tea. If he felt any urgency, I did not see it.

The villagers stayed clear of us from the start. I didn't know why, in the beginning.

“Shouldn't we start setting up the tents?” I asked, that afternoon. Rai glanced at me, and inclined his head.

“There is no hurry,” he said, finally. “But perhaps you are right.”

With that, he stood, ground out his cigarette, and put on his jacket.

“I am going to the village,” he said.

Elise immediately asked if she could come with him.

“It is better if you do not,” he said.

“Why?” she demanded. “I would like to draw their blood. At least to ask them.”

“They do not know Western people here,” Rai said carefully. “Women especially. They will be suspicious if you want to collect your specimens from them. It is better if we wait until they are used to us. Later, perhaps.”

“I do not understand why they will be suspicious of me,” she said, looking back and forth between us.

“It's all right, Elise,” I said.

She looked at me with annoyance. Rai glanced wearily at me, and left the tent.

“Why did you say I should not go?” she demanded, in her excellent state-funded school English.

“Because he didn't want you to. He must have a reason.”

“I do not like people telling me what I should do and what I should not do.”

“We don't know anything about them, Elise. We should listen to him.”

“I am bored, you know?” she said, grudgingly, after a few moments. “I want to get started.”

We were quiet for a while after that, and then she yawned.

“If I cannot go to the village, then I will go to my tent,” she said. “I am sleepy.”

With that, she stood up from the table and stretched. She was small, thin, and lithe, with a hint of sexuality all the same—curves, subtle but undeniable. I noticed this from the beginning, and it reassured me to feel it—to glance at her, sometimes, in that way, as if I were taking sips of water.

She wore her blond hair short, tapered at the neck. She had pale perfect skin, and blue eyes that leapt out against the fleece vest she wore most of the time. Her gestures were precise and delicate. She stood up straight. Her teeth were small and neat, and only a tracery of lines at the corners of her eyes suggested that she was older than she first appeared. She was working on her Ph.D., and by no means a girl, though she looked like one. In the beginning she was quiet, and when I met her I suspected her of both earnestness and dogmatism. It took me a while to see her playfulness, her humor and irreverence; at first, she was dis
tinguished mostly by the attention that even modestly attractive young women receive when they are alone in a world of men.

Rai was gone for several hours. I sat in the dining tent alone, listening to the wind, restless, trying to read. Elise was in her tent when he returned. He stamped in out of the cold, blew on his hands, poured himself a cup of tea, and promptly lit a cigarette.

“Always they are difficult,” he said, shaking his head. “Always. But they will come tomorrow.”

I thanked him.